BizTalk Community series: Introducing Abhijit Mahato

Writing these stories so far on community members has been a great experience and I received a lot of positive feedback. The stories continue with the fourth story in the BizTalk Community Series that brings active BizTalk community members to the foreground. The story today is on Abhijit Mahato. He is a Microsoft Community Contributor since 2011, a blogger and an active BizTalk forum member.

Abhijit is married to his lovely wife Laxmi, and they are expecting their first child in March 2012. His family lives in Kolkata, also known as “The City of Joy, City of Palaces, the Cultural capital of India”, located in the eastern part of India.

Abhijit currently works as a Senior BizTalk Consultant at Capgemini, one of the world’s largest IT Services, Consulting and Outsourcing companies with over 115,000 people operating in 40 countries. His job involves working with customers on integration projects especially using BizTalk Server, WCF (.Net) and SQL Server (SSIS). He loves to design, architect, and develop BizTalk Solution. Also he likes to install and configure BizTalk Server.

He had his first integration project using BizTalk Server 2004 in the year 2005. His senior project manager and customer highly appreciated his work and effort. This motivated him to do more integration projects. Since then Abhijit has worked on many large and complex integration projects with BizTalk.

Abhijit feels that the best thing about working in any integration project is learning BizTalk (Integration product) and also the opportunity to learn other technologies like SAP, EDI, MS CRM and so on. What he likes the most about BizTalk Server product and I quote is:

“It is currently one of the most mature, reliable and stable integration server in the industry.”

Furthermore he describes the product in the following manner:

“It has got a huge number of “out of the box” adapters; and there is a long list of other features like message persistence, recovery in case of failure in communication, correlation, long running transactions, monitoring of business processes, complex mapping, and the ESB. Furthermore BizTalk contains a number of tools like BRE, BAM, SSO, BizTalk Admin console and so on enhancing productivity.”

Finally Abhijit is very excited about Microsoft’s recent announcement of the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2, and is looking forward to exploring and working with this new release.

In his spare time, Abhijit loves to spend time with his family and friends, take participation in various quiz competitions and enjoy solving mathematical and logical puzzles. Besides that he loves reading technical blogs on new Microsoft technologies like Windows AppFabric,Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Azure. Finally he also spends time in contributing to MSDN BizTalk forums and write blogs posts about BizTalk issues and related topics.

Abhijit would like to thank people for reading his posts and appreciates if they can also provide feedback. This will keep him motivated to continue to contribute. He feels this will also improve the online BizTalk community experience for others.  

A final quote from Abhijit:

“I believe that one doesn’t ever get tired until he makes the last attempt and doesn’t ever make the last attempt until he is successful.”

I would like to thank Abhijit for his contributions to the community and the time he took to have a chat with me.

A new blog for BizTalk Administrators

There is a new BizTalk blog. Another one, yes targeted for BizTalk administrators. Why? There are many blogs out there. Yet most of them are focused on the developer. There is not much on BizTalk administrative topics nor one blog where BizTalk administrators share their knowledge, and experience between each other and with the community. Jeroen Hendriks from Axon Olympus started an initiative to create a blog for BizTalk professionals with a heart for managing BizTalk. He talked this through with me sharing some thoughts and a game plan. We took from there and blog is live now!

You can join as contributor by contacting Jeroen (administrator and owner) through Contact Us. Currently besides me and Jeroen, two more professionals from the field joined: Tord Glad Nordahl and Howard S. Edidin. Probably more BizTalk professionals will join over time. I hope many will contribute and even more will read this blog.
Enjoy.

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Rene Brauwers

The third story of the BizTalk Community Series that brings active BizTalk community members to the foreground is on Rene Brauwers. He is mainly an active blogger on BizTalk Server. His blog contains highly valuable posts on setting up a BizTalk infrastructure, how to integrate with CRM 2011 and on many other topics. Last year he also acted as technical reviewer for BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns book and for my forthcoming BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook.

Rene is 34 years old, born in Venlo, the Netherlands, and he moved to The Hague in 1996 to study. Ever since he has stayed in or close to that city. He currently lives together with his girlfriend Miranda in Rijswijk.

Rene is a BizTalk Specialist at Motion10 and is he considers himself as one of those people who is lucky enough to say that he can make a living out of his hobby. His BizTalk expertise ranges from the early stage involvement like pre-sales, proof-of-concepts, requirements gathering, architecting, developing to administration. Besides BizTalk he still finds the opportunity to do some programming as well like C#, SQL, WCF, Entity, WF, Azure and so on.

Rene’s integration background started years ago with WebMethods. The main reason for his involvement with this product back then was that BizTalk according to his employer was not mature enough. His employer choose WebMethods. However Rene has never been a Java kind of guy. He liked Microsoft more, so in the end he was thrilled to get his hands-on experience with BizTalk.

Rene loves the versatility of the BizTalk Server product. Iin fact nowadays it (almost) fits into the complete .Net software stack. He feels that almost every integration challenge can be solved with it.To his opinion there is not another product that offers so much out of the box functionality as BizTalk Server (BRE,BAM, B2B, B2C, ESB, SOA etcetera). All this functionality for such a relative small investment. With this level of versatility Rene believes a developer should be pretty broadly skilled (infra-structure knowledge, security, LOB applications, SQL, .NET, WCF, Cloud, PAAS, SAAS, being able to think in processes, think publish/subscribe, creative, Communicator, Team-player, Documenter etcetera). Besides that as a developer you have to stay on top of the latest developments, which makes it so interesting. He thinks all of this makes us BizTalkers so scarce!!!

In his spare time Rene likes to:

• Spends a lot of time together with his girlfriend Miranda on decorating their house and planning/discussing on how to decorate it. Well actually she comes up with the good ideas and he usually agrees.
• Loves to spend time together with friends, have a few drinks and some laughs.
• Likes to dig into new (Microsoft) Technologies and play around with them.
• Big a fan of (summer) music festivals like Pinkpop, Valtifest, LoveLand, Extrema, Parkpop and so on.
• Study, well that’s one of the perks when you’re in IT, you always have to keep learning and luckily he doesn’t mind.
• Mostly he just chills and relaxes, enjoying live to it’s fullest extent.

Currently Rene doesn’t practice any sports, except for the occasional swim in the morning. Yet he has the intention to start picking up table-tennis again, something he enjoyed when was young. Besides that he loves to watch soccer. He mainly likes to watch 'Oranje' (our National Soccer Team) play. Yet he is still disappointed by the fact that the Dutch lost the World Cup 2010 final from Spain. Rene simply can't wait for the sweet revenge this year with Euro 2012 ;-)

A final quote from Rene:

“Simply treat people as you would like to be treated. Respect each other and be honest. It all sounds so easy, but only if it would be that easy…. “

Rene also has a request for my readers:

If you have a 457 visa for Australia to give away ;-) Feel free to contact him through LinkedIn.

TechNet Wiki: The number of BizTalk articles is growing …

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post for the Official blog of TechNet Wiki with the topic “Wiki-Ninjas on Technology: BizTalk Server”. In that blog post I wrote a story on contributions of the community and Microsoft employees for the TechNet Wiki. Mid December there were little of 40 BizTalk Wiki Articles and over a month’s time it has grown to little over 70. That is a tremendous growth of articles (around 30). It show increasing popularity of the TechNet Wiki as a channel of information on Microsoft technology and products.

The newly added articles on BizTalk Server have been written by myself, Tord Glad Nordahl, Sandro Pereira, Howard S. Edidin, and Mick Badran. All these articles (existing and new) are being improved every day by people mentioned here and others (Microsoft employees and the community). I expect the number will grow over time to over 100+ articles as more community members will probably join.

With the wealth of information on TechNet Wiki, MSDN and other Microsoft channels combined you can fully leverage the BizTalk Server platform. You can reach all the BizTalk related wiki articles through BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki article.

Enjoy reading any of the articles and hopefully you will find them useful.

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Rohit Sharma

This is the second story in the BizTalk Community Series bringing active BizTalk community members to the foreground. I have received a lot of positive feedback from the first post on Tord Gald Nordahl. The series will continue with the second person from the BizTalk community I like to introduce: Rohit Sharma. He has recently been awarded MVP for BizTalk Server, and is an valuable contributor to BizTalk forums and active blogger.

Rohit is 28 years old and lives in Chandigarh, also known as "The City Beautiful", located in the northern part of India. He works in Mohali as a Senior Software Developer at Ionnor Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which is part of EDB ErgoGroup, Norway.

Rohit loves to design and develop BizTalk solutions, and he likes the challenge of tuning the BizTalk environment for performance optimizations. His journey with BizTalk started early 2007 and working with BizTalk since then gave him the opportunities to explore different tools and technologies during various integrations projects. When he started exploring technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Server AppFabric his BizTalk background came in handy.

Rohit loves to spend time with his family and friends, and going through different articles and blog posts on various technologies. He enjoys providing responses to technical issues on the BizTalk forums. Besides contributing to the forums he likes to blog about BizTalk related topics and issues. He likes to play and watch cricket as he is a huge fan of the Indian Cricket Team.

Rohit likes to share the following with the community:

“The difference between a successful person and others is not lack of knowledge, but rather the lack of willingness to share it. Steef-Jan Wiggers is a knowledgeable expert and he has the will to share his knowledge with others through his blogs, speaking engagements and other channels.”

Rohit thinks sharing is the secret to his success.

I would like to thank Rohit for his time and his highly valuable contributions on the BizTalk forums and his blog.

Cheers.

My next ten TechNet Wiki Articles on BizTalk

Last couple of weeks I written a number of wiki articles for TechNet Wiki. The TechNet Wiki is a place, where content is generated by the community and Microsoft employees about Microsoft technologies and products for the community. I very much like the concept and in November 2011 I completed my first ten articles. I continued to work on some articles and now below you will find a list of my next ten completed wiki articles on BizTalk and one on Windows Azure Service Bus EDI/EAI:

• First are a couple of articles on the adapters available through BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010:
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 - WCF SAP Adapter
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 - WCF OracleDb Adapter
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 – WCF SQL Adapter
• BizTalk Server 2010 Adapter Pack - SQL Azure
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 - WCF Oracle E-Business Adapter
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 - WCF based Siebel Adapter
• Next an article on unit testing for BizTalk Server
• An article on BizTalk High Availability
• Overview of all the MSDN BizTalk Code Gallery Samples
• A survival guide for BizTalk Business Rules Engine
• Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs – Introduction article I wrote just after CTP was released. I updated it later with some more resource links to blogs.

I hope you will find these articles useful. Feel free to edit any of them (correct, add, enhance). The complete list of BizTalk wiki articles can be found here. I myself will be working on next couple of articles in the near future, which will contain some in depth ones.

Cheers!

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Tord Glad Nordahl

Most of you are familiar with the interview series by Richard Seroter. Based on this concept I want to start with a series of blog posts, in which I would like to introduce active BizTalk community members. Contrary to the interview series the focus here will be solely on BizTalk Server. It will bring several active BizTalk community members to the foreground.

The first person from the BizTalk community I like to introduce is Tord Glad Nordahl, an active community personality with a strong BizTalk administrative background. He has been active on forums and TechNet Wiki for the last couple of months. I had a chat with him on his background, what kept him busy in real-life, what sports he enjoys practicing and/or watching and what he would like to say to the BizTalk community.

Tord is 25 years old, has a beautiful wife Alfa, and has a lovely daughter Maribell who is nearly two years old. In June they are expecting their second child. The family lives in the rainy city of Bergen in Norway. He works as a BizTalk Administrator Expert for Bouvet ASA, and is stationed in Stavanger working for Statoil 4 days a week.

He likes to call himself a BizTalk advisor, or as he states a BizTalk Administrator Expert. He doesn’t like developing BizTalk solutions but instead focuses more on the environment itself. In his day to day job he is busy with performance optimizations, health checks, monitoring and reviewing applications and solutions. This to ensure that all the processes run according to Microsoft‘s best practices. His job is to make sure that the customer will get all the benefits of BizTalk as an integration platform.

In his spare time he likes to spend as much time as possible with his family. Besides that, he roams around blogs, writes blog posts and TechNet Wiki articles, and contributes to the BizTalk forums and to the local and international BizTalk community in any way he can. He likes to do research on BizTalk using his infrastructure at home. He has four servers running a BizTalk 2010 environment (2 BizTalk clusters and 2 SQL servers clustered) enabling him to experiment with different scenario’s. He then shares his findings on his blog. Besides being a respected BizTalk professional, he also happens to be very handy, doing all kinds of work around the house, much to his wife’s liking. Jobs like building brick walls, removing doors or do some flooring, are no problem. Tord loves soccer and supports his home team "Brann". Unfortunately, he himself can no longer practice soccer due to a knee injury. Therefore he switched to cycling these days.

Tord would like to thank people for reading his blog posts, and he is grateful for the opportunity to learn more about BizTalk through the community and research. He recommends all of you to go into the TechNet Wiki and to contribute and participate in the Forums. Being active in the community and contributing to the community will make it grow bigger and better. And as he likes to state: “Be proud of who you are, and don't be afraid to speak your mind”.

And in Norwegian he finished of our chat with a "Tusen takk Steef-Jan" (Thank you) for all your contributions to the community and for taking time to chat with me. It’s been a pleasure.

I like to thank Tord for his time and am looking forward to meeting him during the BizTalk innovation event at my company 1st of February.