Enterprise BizTalk Solution Case

This year I architected, designed, developed and supported (still do actually) an enterprise BizTalk solution. It involves integration between eBusiness Suite from Oracle an ERP product for in this case Human Resource Management, Logistics, and Financials and Corporate SharePoint Portal. Applications inside this portal need data from Oracle eBusiness Apps. This data for this case was employee data. Data like name, employee number, and supervisor and so on. Inside the employee portal application a search could be done given a set of parameters like last name and so. Result of the search could be nothing, or employee no longer employed or employee details like which unit, location, name, employee number, phone, email etcetera (contact details). Picture below gives an overview of how data is extracted from Oracle eBusiness to Corporate Portal.













A message to be picked by a BizTalk process is scheduled (A). This message results in a request for employee data from Oracle (B). In a previous post I explained how to set this up. Result messages holding employee records, if there are any, are split up in single messages containing one employee each (C). Splitter pattern is easy to implement in BizTalk using pipeline component for instance or through map/orchestration. Each individual message is then used to be enriched by data from Active Directory like email address, not available inside Oracle (D). Reason email address data is not inside Oracle eBusiness HRM is that this is a leading cooperate application, where employees are updated of created and then later in the process their AD account, email and so on is setup. AD details are not synchronized back in any way to this application. When data is enriched a message containing it is send to last process to create or update xml profiles used inside portal application (E). This done by calling a web service to provide profile based on unique parameter like employee number, if not present a new profile will be created. If profile is not new its data is updated. Updated or new profile is presented back to a web service that will update xml profile files or create a new one.

Next year this case will be hopefully published inside a Dutch software magazine. This year I successfully published an article inside .NET Magazine, a Dutch Magazine published by Microsoft. I enjoy writing and so far I have done a lot of blog posts and some articles. Cheers!!!

Technorati:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DTAP Strategy: Pricing and Licensing

Image
To implement BizTalk solutions it is a good practice to have an DTAP environment in place. DTAP stands for Development, Test, Acceptance and Production. Development and test environments are equal (mirrored) and same account for acceptance and production. Deploying DTAP environments is easy, because there are many factors influencing outcome of DTAP. One factor is pricing and licensing costs. BizTalk is available in different editions and since BizTalk depends on operating system and database there are some configuration options to. Here is an overview of possible configurations for DTAP environments, hence there is a nice BizTalk Feature Dependency Matrix. Besides features, there are non-functional requirements to reckon with like fail-over, availability and scalability. On Microsoft Pricing and Licensing FAQ section of BizTalk I found this on non functional side. In a large BizTalk Server 2006 R2 deployment, two key considerations ensure redundancy in all areas of the architect
Read more

Table Operation on Oracle 11g XE with OracleDbBinding

Image
Last year I did a post on table operations on SQL Server Table with WCF-SQL Adapter from BizTalk on SQL. Now I like to do similar thing on table in Oracle 11g Express database using the Oracle Binding from BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010. Oracle 11g Express Edition is available through OTN. For downloading software you will need to have an account! It is important that when accessing Oracle you have appropriate client installed. This can sometimes be a hassle if you do not know, which client you need. When you trying to connect to Oracle you will get error messages like: Connecting to the LOB system has failed. Could not load file or assembly 'Oracle.DataAccess, Version=2.111.7.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89b483f429c47342' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.. This can be pretty annoying, but there is documentation that can help you going the right direction. In installation documentation I read that supported versions are: Oracle d
Read more

Integration, the community blasting into 2017!

Image
In the past, now and tomorrow I will keep saying that integration is relevant, even in this day and age of digitalization. Integration professionals will play an essential role in providing connectivity between systems, devices and services. Integration drives the digitalization forward by connecting everything with anything. Integration skills are still in demand. A LinkedIn study revealed a top 10 with integration and middleware in top 5 with Cloud, Data Science, UX and Web. And the expectation for 2017 is that this will be similar. Our toolbox is expanding from on premise tooling to cloud services; we have WCF, BizTalk Server, MSMQ to Logic Apps, API Management and Service Bus. Formats ranging from flat file, EDI, XML to JSON, several protocols open and proprietary, tooling from mappers to BizTalk360. It can be challenging yet much more exciting. My conclusion is more options, more fun, at least in my view. In February I, will be travellin
Read more