As Lex Hegt mentioned earlier in his post, most of the authors at BizTalkAdminsBlogging.com also contribute at TechNet.  Besides helping to improve or add new contents in existing Wiki articles, they have their personal blogs, help users in BizTalk Forums, contribute to other BizTalk communities, they also write new Wiki articles and add new scripts to the TechNet Galleries.

In my scripts I regularly check the status of host instances on a BizTalk system. For example, if I want to start a host instance in a script, I first check if it isn’t in started state already.

To show how you can check the status of a host instance, I created a small script. The scripts returns the state of all host instances on all servers in the array servers:

$servers = ("BizTalk2010n1", "BizTalk2010n2")

I’m conducting a contest in my personal blog and also found it interesting to share here for one reason: this book is written not only for BizTalk developers but also for BizTalk administrators, system engineers, infrastructure architects, solution architects and database administrators as Lex Hegt wrote in his review.

Over the years we have seen so many common challenges in an enterprise environment when it comes to BizTalk environment day-to-day operations. Here are the top 7 challenges, we have seen.

1. Remote Desktop access to physical production servers

2. Ability to start/stop BizTalk artifacts, Host Instances, Service instances without any audit trace

3. Access to production SQL server instances

4. No or minimal monitoring of BizTalk environments

5. No idea whether your environment is working optimally or throttled heavily

6. No read-only access support

7. No way to isolate application data in a shared environment

In below sections we will explain a bit about each section and see how BizTalk360 can help address all these old practices.

I often perform BizTalk health checks for my customers. One of the checks I do is to see if they are using software that is still supported by Microsoft. I do not think it is per definition wrong to use software that is out of support. It is however a risk that they should know about, so that they can accept the risk or resolve it.

In April 2012 this book came available through publisher Packt Publishing. This cookbook was written by BizTalk MVP Steef-Jan Wiggers with assistance of fellow BizTalk MVP Randal van Splunteren. In this article I’ll review this book and describe who should buy this book and why.

I had a discussion with some of the other bloggers (Sandro Pereira, Lex Hegt, Steef-Jan Wiggers and Tord Glad Nordahl) on this website about initial file sizes for BizTalk databases. This discussion was based on the following article:

http://www.biztalkadminsblogging.com/index.php/item/66-checking-database-autogrowth-settings

Imagine that you are looking for a BizTalk admin, and somehow, magically your recruiter found some great resumes and set you up with some interviews. What questions are you going to ask to get a good feeling about the candidates technical knowledge? Tord Glad Nordahl did some great work about that:

http://biztalkadmin.com/biztalk-administrator-interview-questions/

Ohhh, and p.s., if you are a BizTalk admin who lives in The Netherlands and you know all of these answers, or know a BizTalk admin like that, please let me know (jeroen AT BizTalkAdminsBlogging dot com). I can set you up with an great job opportunity (interesting work, nice colleagues and an excellent salary). :)