What’s New in BizTalk Server 2020!
Tags: biztalk
Published: 2022-02-22 08:23:22

At our annual event Integrate, Microsoft announced last year that BizTalk Server 2020 should have released in the first quarter of 2019. Only two weeks in the new year, Microsoft has released BizTalk Server 2020 (v3.13.717.0)! In this blog, we want to update you on what’s new in this version of the product.

## No Changes in Available Editions
Similar to earlier versions of the product, BizTalk Server 2020 comes in 4 flavors:

* Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 Developer
* Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 Branch
* Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 Standard [to do: changed limitations]
* Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 Enterprise

## New Features in BizTalk Server 2020
During Integrate 2019, Paul Larsen, the Program Manager who is responsible for BizTalk Server, already highlighted which new features are coming in BizTalk Server 2020. You can read a recap about Paul’s session here.

As you can understand from Paul’s session, we were already expecting platform alignment. More importantly, BizTalk Server 2020 contains all features from BizTalk Server 2016, including the 3 Feature Packs, which have been released.

### Audit Log
Until now, no auditing was available for any operations performed against the BizTalk environment. Luckily, from BizTalk Server 2020 on, the Administration console provides auditing of operations. To be able to use this feature, you will have to turn it on in the Group Settings screen.

### BizTalk2020-Audit-Log

The auditing data is stored in the Management database, and you can access it via the Operational Services. At the moment, the supported operations are:

* Creating, updating and deleting ports
* Suspending, resuming and terminating service instances
* Adding, updating and removing BizTalk applications
* Importing binding files

Although this is a good start, multiple important operations are still missing; think of starting/stopping of ports, orchestrations, and host instances. We hope that Microsoft adds such operations in the future.

### Support of .NET Framework v4.7
Earlier, Microsoft has announced that .NET 4.8 will be supported.

### New Read-Only Operator role
The BizTalk Operator role has changed. Where before, it was possible to perform actions like stopping/starting ports and changing the port configuration, this role is now completely read-only. This can certainly be useful for facilitating DevOps scenarios.

When accessing the BizTalk Server 2020 Admin console as a BizTalk Operator, all the operations are still accessible. However, when an operator tries, for example, to stop a port, an error message shows up, and the operation becomes blocked. Unfortunately, the error message is not always clear that the operation is blocked due to insufficient permissions.


### BAM Portal is Deprecated
Microsoft has decided to deprecate the BAM portal. Probably due to the new capabilities to push data to Azure, they decided to deprecate the old-fashioned BAM portal. In case you are using BAM, and you are considering upgrading to BizTalk Server 2020, you can still install and configure the BAM portal from the BizTalk installer and configuration wizard; you won’t be left in the dark.

### Deprecated and Removed Adapters
Multiple updates in this area as well. For example, Microsoft deprecates the POP3 and the SMTP adapters in favor of the Office 365 adapters, which appeared in the BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Packs. Next, the old [BizTalk SQL adapter](https://www.biztalk360.com/blog/biztalk-server-2020-migration-how-to-deal-with-deprecated-or-removed-adapters/) has been removed and replaced by the WCF-SQL adapter, and the JDE OneWorld and the WCF-NetTcpRelay adapter have both been deprecated.


### BizTalk360 Support of BizTalk Server 2020
The BizTalk360 product team has eagerly followed the developments around BizTalk Server 2020, and we are glad that BizTalk Server 2020 has been released. For BizTalk360, it is evident that the product must support all recent versions of BizTalk Server.

That’s why we made the latest released versions of BizTalk360 and Atomic Scope compatible with BizTalk Server 2020!

## Conclusion
BizTalk Server 2020 has been released. This is the 11th version of the product since its inception in 2000. Although we have already seen most of the features of this release (in the BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Packs), this is still a useful release. Especially when you are still on versions older than BizTalk Server 2016, it will certainly be worth upgrading or migrating to this release.