A whole raft of whitepapers for BizTalk have been released over the last several weeks - see here and here.

I completed a whitepaper a short while back (though just released) on getting the most out of the BizTalk 2004 Management Pack and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005.  The paper serves as a good reference for the management pack, but I hope it also serves another useful purpose.  Specifically, the "operational hand-off" phase of the software development life cycle often gets short shrift - and it can cost organizations a lot of money, downtime, and late nights.  So, much of the paper discusses the importance of having a development team accurately communicate the "instrumentation surface area" of their completed efforts to an operations team. 

What do I mean by "instrumentation surface area"?  To start, we can consider the sum of all diagnostic logging, event logging, WMI events, performance counters (custom or built-in), and all other mechanisms your application uses to communicate its current operational & health state.  Moreover, we need to capture "interpretations" of this information stream that are specific to the application.  (Not just "this send port isn't working..." but "We are currently not talking to our primary shipping provider...")  Finally, we need to capture suggested responses and remediation - also specific to the application.

"Communicated to the operations team"...how exactly?  With a Word doc?  Well, in particular, I talk about how to do this for a BizTalk-focused solution using a custom MOM Management Pack that "derives" from the Microsoft-supplied BizTalk 2004 Management Pack.  Done right, this will provide the highest fidelity knowledge transfer from development to operations.

See what you think - the paper is titled "Advanced Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Scenarios." (What a mouthful...)  

Comment on this post (if you like) with your thoughts on the paper or experience in this area...