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Training · Remote or on site · United Kingdom

Microsoft stopped teaching BizTalk.Somebody still has to run it.

There is no Microsoft Official Curriculum for BizTalk Server 2020, and no certification to sit — the last official courseware dates from 2006 and was retired years ago. We teach it from twenty years of building and supporting production BizTalk solutions instead.

Enquire about trainingSee the courses

Why there is nothing official

BizTalk Server 2020 is the final release. Mainstream support ends in April 2028 and extended support in April 2030, and Microsoft's investment has moved to Azure Logic Apps. Its own BizTalk training page now points only at third parties.

Be wary of anything advertising a "BizTalk 2020 certification" — there is no exam to pass. What people actually need is someone who has run the product in anger.

Which is usually why people call

  • Someone has left, and an estate nobody fully understands has landed on a new pair of shoulders.
  • A support team is being asked to own BizTalk without ever having been taught it.
  • A migration to Azure is coming, and the team needs to understand what they have before they can plan to replace it.
  • A developer needs to change a solution written by someone who is no longer available to ask.

The courses

Three options. All can be delivered one-to-one or to a small group, and the content is adjusted to the estate you actually run.

01

2 days

BizTalk Server 2020 Administration

For whoever now has to keep a BizTalk estate running — typically someone who has inherited it.

Platform and architecture

  • What a BizTalk group actually is, and how the runtime fits together
  • The MessageBox, and why almost every performance problem leads back to it
  • Hosts and host instances — separation, and the failure modes when you get it wrong
  • Adapters, receive locations and send ports in the admin console
  • The SQL Server dependency, and the SQL Agent jobs that must never stop running

Running it day to day

  • Tracking, DTA purge and archive — the job that silently fills a disk
  • Throttling: what triggers it, which performance counters tell you, and what to do
  • Suspended messages: triage, resume, terminate, and when not to
  • Backup, restore and disaster recovery, including log shipping
  • Cumulative updates: what CU level you are on, and how to patch a group safely
  • Monitoring and BAM, plus where third-party tooling earns its place

02

2 days

BizTalk Server 2020 Development

Aimed at maintaining and safely changing existing solutions, not designing new ones.

Scoped deliberately around maintenance. BizTalk 2020 is the final release, so almost nobody is starting greenfield work — the skill that matters is understanding what is already there.

Reading an existing solution

  • Solution anatomy: schemas, maps, pipelines, orchestrations and how they connect
  • Tracing a single message end to end, from receive location to send port
  • Property promotion and routing — why a message went where it went
  • Flat file and XML schemas, and reverse-engineering one from a real sample
  • Maps and functoids, including custom XSLT

Changing it without breaking it

  • Debugging orchestrations and pipelines, and reading tracked message bodies
  • The Business Rules Engine, where it is used and how to change a policy
  • Versioning and side-by-side deployment
  • Deployment: MSI and bindings, and the BizTalk Deployment Framework (BTDF)
  • Visual Studio versions — VS2019 up to CU6, VS2022 from CU7, and why that matters
  • Setting up a local development environment that matches production

03

3 days

Administration and Development combined

Both courses condensed into three days, for someone who has ended up owning the whole thing.

Structure

  • Day 1 — platform, architecture and the operational essentials
  • Day 2 — reading, tracing and debugging existing solutions
  • Day 3 — making and deploying changes, plus what migration to Azure would involve

How it is delivered

One-to-one or small group
One-to-one covers noticeably more ground, because we skip what you already know and go deep where you are weak. Small groups work well where everyone shares a role.
Remote or on site
Remote is often better: it can be split into half-days, so delegates try things on their own estate between sessions and bring real questions back. On site across the UK where you prefer it.
Hands-on labs
A dedicated lab environment per delegate, or — better where possible — we work in your own non-production BizTalk group, so the exercises use your schemas, your adapters and your configuration.

Before any course we ask about your estate: BizTalk version and cumulative update level, edition, adapters in use, and whether anything is already integrated with Azure. The lab is built to match, which matters far more than being on the newest version.

The kind of thing we teach

Written up on the blog over the years — a reasonable sample of the material and the level it is pitched at.

Enquire about training

Tell us who needs training, what they already know, and what your estate looks like. We will come back with a course outline shaped around it, and a price.

We also work through training resellers and partners — happy to quote on that basis.

Get in touchinfo@biztalkers.com