Installing BizTalk 2016 feature pack 1

Microsoft recently released feature pack 1 for BizTalk server 2016, this is first time such feature pack is presented and off course it is for enriching customers experience that too without breaking existing functionality.

Organizations can only use Feature Pack 1 with BizTalk Server 2016 if they have the Enterprise or Developer editions of the product, plus Software Assurance. No other editions are eligible. It's also possible to use Feature Pack 1 if BizTalk Server is run in Azure with an Enterprise Agreement, the MSDN article explained

So thought of installing it and exploring it, installation is quite straight forward - steps below


2. Run the installer 
BizTalk feature Pack1 installer

BizTalk feature Pack1 installer wizard page 1

BizTalk feature Pack1 installer wizard page 2 Accept agreement

BizTalk feature Pack1 installer wizard page 3

BizTalk feature Pack1 installer wizard page 4

BizTalk feature Pack1 instalation complete

BizTalk feature Pack1 instalation complete restart



This installation requires to restart the server to reflect the installed features.

Microsoft claims Feature Pack 1 is production ready and provides only non-breaking features (Off course we need to verify this before thinking of Production). Is there anything noticeable thing(after installation) supporting below features - there saw few things


Deployment:

1. Deploy with VSTS – Enable Continuous Integration to automatically deploy and update applications using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)
2.New management APIs – Manage your environment remotely using the new REST APIs with full Swagger support


Analytics:

1.Application Insights – Tap into the power of Azure for tracking valuable application performance and to better understand your workflow 

To support this there is an option provided in tracking section wherein we can Enable Analytics. What is Application insights - After creating Application Insight, capture the instrumentation Key, as this is needed when enabling Analytics on BizTalk group and it is passed as connection parameters


BizTalk feature Pack1 enable Application Insight on Group



BizTalk feature Pack1 enable Application Insight send port

BizTalk feature Pack1 enable Application Insight receive port

BizTalk feature Pack1 enable Application Insight Orchestration


2.Leverage operational data – View operational data from anywhere and with any device using Power BI



Runtime:

1.Support for Always Encrypted – Use the WCF-SQL adapter to connect to SQL Server secure Always Encrypted columns



SQL Server 2016 introduced a feature that enables client applications to read/write encrypted data within a SQL table without actually providing the encryption keys to SQL Server and that's been included in WCF SQL adapter as a property, by default it is Disabled.


BizTalk feature Pack1 enable Sql ColumnEncryptionSetting

2.Advanced Scheduling – Set up advanced schedules using the new capabilities with Feature Pack 1 

If you would have used Scheduled task adapter, this was on developers wanted list for long time to have scheduling capability on granular level. Including Time zone is really thoughtful


Advanced Scheduling



If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to do in comments section below !!!


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