Still Running BizTalk, 6 Things You Need to Think About
- Bill Chesnut
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The Hidden Risks of Lost Knowledge: What Happens When BizTalk Server Support Ends in 2030
BizTalk Server: A History
Microsoft BizTalk Server was initially released in 2000 and has been actively enhanced and maintained, with the most recent release being BizTalk Server 2020. BizTalk Server 2020 mainstream support ends on April 11, 2028, and extended support ends on April 9, 2030 (extended support only provides security updates and the option to pay for additional fixes). On the 18th of December 2025, Microsoft announced that there would be no more versions of BizTalk Server.
With a bit of history out of the way, the majority of BizTalk Server development occurred with the BizTalk Server 2010, 2013, and 2013 R2 releases, which were released over a decade ago, leading to the first three issues you need to think about:
Do you have anyone left in your organisation who knows precisely what your BizTalk Server Applications are doing?
Do you still have any BizTalk Server developers in your organisation who can review the BizTalk Server Applications code and document what they do?
Are the systems BizTalk Server is connected to still supported until 2030?
BizTalk Server Complexity
BizTalk Server was way ahead of the competition when it was released in 2004, offering companies a range of components to integrate their environments. These components sometimes make it difficult to understand precisely what a BizTalk Server Application is doing with a particular message. There are Inbound and Outbound pipelines that control how messages are transformed to and from XML. There is also the capability to create a custom pipeline component in C#. Mapping message is a key feature of BizTalk and can be performed at all stages of BizTalk Server message processing. Maps can also include custom XSLT and custom C# code. The orchestration engine in BizTalk Server can also consist of embedded code blocks and calls to external .NET assemblies. BizTalk Server also include built-in capabilities to process EDI (AS2, X12, and EDIFACT) messages.
Given the potential for all these custom code capabilities, a BizTalk Server Application can be much more complex than the initial view in the BizTalk Server administration portal suggests.
BizTalk Server in Your Organisation
What SixPivot has observed with existing BizTalk Server customers is that most knowledge about the BizTalk Server Application is no longer within the organisation, and some business-related expertise is based on the original specification rather than on what was actually built.
Over the past couple of years, SixPivot has been upgrading BizTalk Server 2010, 2013 and 2013 R2 to BizTalk Server 2020 for customers whose security teams have required them to remove unsupported versions of Windows Server and SQL Server from their environments.
Note: BizTalk Server typically supports only Windows Server and SQL Server versions released before the version was released, except for BizTalk Server 2020 Cumulative Update 6, which added support for Windows Server 2022 and SQL Server 2022.
Transitioning Away from BizTalk Server
The following three issues, and the most critical item to consider, are how you transition your applications to a solution after BizTalk Server goes out of support.
Are the systems being connected to from BizTalk Server still on-premises, or are they now in the Cloud?
What is the future of the systems being used to replace BizTalk Server?
Do some of the systems connected to BizTalk Server also need to be upgraded?
How SixPivot Can Help
With SixPivot's expertise in integration, specifically BizTalk Server integration, we can help
you answer most of these questions and ensure your strategic plans are in place to make the transition away from BizTalk Server as smooth as possible.
SixPivot can provide the following services for your smooth transition:
Review and Document BizTalk Server Applications
Recommend the best path away from BizTalk Server
Estimate Effort to transition away from BizTalk Server
Upskill your development teams to make the transition away from BizTalk Server
Contact SixPivot for Assistance
Reach out to us at:
Email: sales@sixpivot.com
Phone: 1800 6 PIVOT
Follow us: LinkedIn
Bill Chesnut is a Cloud Platform & API Evangelist and Microsoft MVP at SixPivot. His work has expanded from a traditional on-premises integration and development background to include some of the latest Microsoft Azure technologies, including Azure DevOps, Azure Integration Services, and Azure Front Door.
