Today, Steve Martin announced a few details about the next version of BizTalk that will be available in early 2009. Called BizTalk Server 2006 R3, this amounts to an incremental release of the product that does NOT correspond to the Oslo wave. The “headline” for this release is compatibility with the latest version of the Microsoft platform (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio.NET 2008). Looks like a couple additional nuggets will be added, such as new and enhanced adapters (such as WCF SQL adapter?).
I’m not a fan of the naming. Why not call it BizTalk Server 2000 R7? If the software is going to have a “year” attached to its name, seems like a good idea to actually increment it. All joking aside, the name makes SOME sense because this is really just a service pack on the existing BizTalk Server 2006 code base. Calling it BizTalk Server 2009 would create a perception of a brand new product, which this is not.
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Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 
I think too many people still have nightmares about BTS 2000. =)
Why not call Vista “Windows ME 6”?
Hopefully they will quickly add more details on the enhancements…
I think R3 is actually the correct naming, since it’s a ‘simple’ enhancement of BTS 2006. Besides, naming it BTS 2009 would set expectations about ISB and Oslo.