BizTalk Administration Tutorials

This post is for those of you who are administrators rather then developers, and don’t keep track of the latest downloads around BizTalk. Microsoft has, at the same time that they released a revised version of the developer centric tutorials, released BizTalk Server 2006 Adminstration Tutorials. The administration tutorials are planned to become two, although at the moment only one is available. The first part is setting up the environment, in this case a slightly altered version of what is available in the multi-server scenario of the installation guides adding on an ISA Server to be able to create the environment separate from your corporate network. The tutorials also describes how to setup this environment using Virtual Server 2005 R2 (although physical hardware is also mentioned) and goes much more in depth to make it a compelling learning experience, as opposed to the install guide that can sometimes be hard to follow for a first timer. The first tutorial weighs in at 138 pages (double the size of the install guide), not counting the supporting documents. The second part is supposed to feature common administrative exercises based on the environment setup in part 1. If your are to familiarize youself with BizTalk Server 2006 as an administrator, from what I’ve seen, I’d recommend these tutorials.