Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

11.6. Tools to Assist You

Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) deals with problems of varying severities daily, ranging from minor issues during development to show-stopping issues in production on major systems. In addition to dealing with reactive issues, PSS also offers proactive services, such as architectural reviews and workshops designed to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place. To assist the engineers who perform this work and ensure that they are empowered to diagnose the root cause of an issue and resolve it as quickly as possible, a suite of tools has been developed internally. As the tools become widely used internally, they are often also released as downloads from one of the Microsoft web sites. Unfortunately, many customers are not aware of these tools and end up working much harder than is necessary to resolve an issue or remain dependent on PSS.

The purpose of this section is to empower you to be able to use many of the tools that are used by the PSS and Premier Field Engineers. In summary, this section will enable you to work smarter, not harder.

11.6.1. BizTalk Best Practices Analyzer (BPA)

This tool, which primarily examines production and staging environments, is designed to automatically examine a deployment of BizTalk 2006 and generate a list of issues pertaining to a list of best-practice standards. During the many problems that I have been called to resolve for customers, poor configuration has been the cause of a number of these problems. ...