Beyond BizTalk Server 2006 Release 2, promised for the first half of next year, BizTalk will evolve to more of a unified process server, said Oliver Sharp, general manager for BizTalk, at Microsoft's Tech Ed 2006 conference in Boston last week.
"There is an opportunity for a unified offering, a comprehensive middle-tier server with business processes as the orienting paradigm," he said.
As another interim step, the Redmond, Wash.-based company plans an adapter framework to ease development of linkages to all sorts of back-office applications. This framework will build atop Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation.
