I know what you're thinking,  "what ... I thought this blog had been shut down?".  Not quite,  I will admit that I've been a little less than active though.  I'm just coming out of about 2 1/2 months of *very* busy new job startup stuff.  I think it's safe to say that I now know what it means to be really busy :) Things are just starting to settle down now so I hope to be posting to this and my new Business Intelligence blog (also on SOAPitStop.com). 

The reason for this post is that I wanted to share a new publication that came out of a huge collaboration with all of the Microsoft field and support professionals that work every day with BizTalk 2006. They basically took all those experiences and put together a 625 page operations/field manual.  This will fill in the gaps from all of those BizTalk books that have been published.  I don't know about you but I'm always looking for best practices and checklists to make sure I know I am at least starting from a good solid base.  Sure these things are never absolute but they probably hit the 80/20 rule for sure.  This is also very relevant for my new job where I'm responsible for helping customers adhere to best practices for custom solutions which may include base products like BizTalk,  SQL Server, Team Foundation Server, Project Server, Visual Studio, etc.. 

 As far as the operations guide,  here are some highlights:

• Planning for performance and high availability
• Operational readiness checklist
• Best practices for configuring SQL Server
• Monitoring Biztalk Applications
• Best practices for deploying an application
• Using the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool to assess the health of BizTalk server
• Best practices for disaster recovery
• Investigating and Identifying performance bottlenecks

Click here to download your own copy: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc296643.aspx