Microsoft announced yesterday that the first public beta of BizTalk Server 2009 is available for download. The announcement was made at the  Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit, and included the news that BizTalk RFID Mobile and the BizTalk RFID Standards Pack are generally available.

BizTalk RFID Mobile extends BizTalk Server RFID to mobile devices running Windows Mobile and Windows CE. According to the Microsoft press release, customers are already seeing benefits from deploying mobile radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions on the new platform. Ken Vollmer, principal analyst with Forrester Research, comments that "the big impact here is the enablement of RFID capability on a wider range of mobile devices through the availability of full RFID features on Windows Mobile and Windows CE.  This will open up opportunities to use RFID in a wider range of business scenarios."

Go to  BizTalk and RFID Announcements for the the extended article.

For download information go to Microsoft's download site.