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This morning we released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of our BizTalk Services; access to the site will start at 8 AM PST.
 
For those of you who have been using our services up at labs.live.com, this is the fifth update to our hosted services.  With this release we moved the services to their new home at labs.biztalk.net. 
 
Some of you might be wondering why we’ve moved to labs.biztalk.net.    To make sense of this it is helps to know a little more about where we are going…
 
Today many businesses run on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).  An ESB provides applications with a uniform set of mechanisms for naming, discovery, message routing, publish and subscribe eventing, message transformations, workflows, and so on.  
 
Here at Microsoft we think our Server platform does an excellent of job of providing a comprehensive set of ESB technologies though Windows Server, the .NET Framework, and BizTalk Server.  This platform is complemented with a great set of development tools in Visual Studio.
 
Even though setting up these products is pretty straight-forward, to really get everything configured just right and deployed can be daunting... especially for federated composite applications that span organizational boundaries. 
 
So we are extending our technologies, and the notion of an Enterprise Service Bus, to seamlessly work as a hosted service, thus creating the first Internet Service Bus.
 
The BizTalk Services CTP is intended to give developers an early look at our thinking about how we can bring these capabilities together. 
 
We are excited about BizTalk Services and we are really looking forward to getting your feedback.
 
My next post will have some information on some of the technologies you’ll see soon at http://labs.biztalk.net.