YEAR 2008

Well in some places now in the world it is New Year. Year 2008; what will it bring us? For starters Visual Studio 2008, it’s already out there and I have seen a couple of books already about VS 2008. I have bought a couple of eBooks at APRESS to have some new reading material and something to learn. Next is BizTalk 2006 R2 for me. A couple of customers will migrate to this new version of BizTalk or start new projects, where BizTalk 2006 R2 will be used. Third and last will be .NET 3.0 technologies like WCF, WF. Hopefully I will be doing a project, where these new technologies will be used. I also will have a peek at .NET 3.5. I wish everybody a happy new year.

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My MOSS 2007 Experience

Last week I received a new laptop from my employer Inter Access. It’s Lenovo T61 with a dual core processor, 4Gb and 160 Gb Disk. It has Vista Enterprise installed on it, so I can finally work with Vista with a performing laptop. Focus today at Inter Access is SOA and High Performance Workplace. I am more involved in the SOA part than the other and have done a lot inside this area if you look at blog posts the last 15 months or so. One of the first things I have done on my new laptop is setting up VPC 2007 and created an image on it with MOSS 2007. Why, well MOSS is a part of Microsoft SOA software stack as I mention in post SOA with BizTalk.

What I did was I installed Windows 2003 Server R2 with SP2 first, then I installed the virtual machine additions. After these initial installations I fully patched the server and added a few server roles like Application Server, Mail Server, Domain Controller and DNS. This all went smoothly and next thing I did was installing SQL Server 2005 Enterprise. I then downloaded .net framework 3.0 and installed this too. Finally I installed MOSS 2007 enterprise. and configured it. Picture below displays were I reached with it so far.


















As one can see I still have a couple of things to do, but I can tell you setting this up was easy and did take not long at all. I let you know how this will end.

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Universal SOA

Today I got another mail from SOAWorld in my mailbox with a couple of links to some sessions held at SOAWorld Conference held this year. I looked at session David Linthicum's calles 'Web 2.0' - It's the Universal SOA. You have to register to watch it. It's a nice overview session around SOA and Web 2.0.

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Last Mile of SOA with Enterprise Web 2.0

SOAWorld states:

Enterprises continue to look for return on investment of their service-orientated architectures, and it is Enterprise Web 2.0 that makes this possible by connecting the last mile of SOA to end-users.

So Web 2.0 enables IT to connect people with services. This will be a win-win solution for the enterprise; where not only IT, and end-users benefit but businesses benefits as well, from increased ROI and enhanced use and IT productivity.

See Bob Buffone's Session at SOAWorld 2007 East on SYS-CON.TV. Good session, have a look.

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Web 2.0 Applications, where have I been ...

Steef-Jan Wiggershttp://SteefJanW.bebo.com/

I must say I like this web 2.0. In a previous post I mentioned Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. As you have noticed I use Technorati and LinkedIn. Now I also have started using Plaxo, Bebo, Last.fm, and Fickr. Nice to see what you can do on the web compared to what you could do a couple of years ago, when most things were static. What I really like is last.fm, where you can listen to all sorts of music. I must say all these apps and probably more off them are just awesome. I must have been asleep last one, two years or more having not noticed all this. I was probably having my head too much in BizTalk, SOA and so on. Well back to exploring these apps some more and become a digitali.



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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!!!

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