DevDays 2008 Day 2

Second day at DevDays 2008 was for me a complete day of networking and talking to former colleagues and professionals of competitors like Macaw. I only attended one session by David Platt. When I came home I saw a copy of Software Release Magazine 3 (Dutch), which contains my article about BizTalk Services, and I felt joy and satisfaction. Technology can be so cool. Thanks Dre de Man for giving the opportunity to publish the article. Finally Wouter Crooy and Wouter Goedvriend we had a lot of fun and good discussions.

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DevDays 2008 Day 1

Today I attended Dutch Developer Days, which started off with a keynote from David Platt. He did a session about why software sucks. And if ever heard of him or read his blog than you basically know everything that has been said during the talk. My conclusion or lesson learned is that user experience is important and Microsoft already knows that for years. Next session I went was BizTalk Services by Christian Weyer and covered a lot I already seen or heard before. I liked his demo TFSNotification service, in which he showed changes made in with TFS like checking created a notification somewhere else through a service one subscribes too. A good source of biztalk services experiences is a blog called vibro.net; check it out. Rest of day I used to network and meet people like colleagues, ex-colleagues, partners, customers and journalists.

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Social Networking Rocks

During my holiday in Como Italy I read two book from Havard Business School Press. One called ‘Thinking for a Living’ by Thomas H. Davenport and ‘Future of Work’ by Thomas W. Malone. Both very interesting books and I enjoyed reading them. Especially ‘ Thinking for a Living’ that I and all IT people do these days, our brain provides a living. Cool, because during my years a student I did a lot of hard labor, where not much thinking was involved. Those days I was very slim and athletic though, compared to now having a little overweight and no hair (probably lost doing a lot of thinking). Thing is according to Davenport knowledge workers (IT people included) can be highly productive if one has a large and diverse network (like for instance work, family or social one like Linkedin), have a lot of ties inside and outside of their company, learn through not only people, but also work experience, and finally juggle a lot of information inside their heads. I am I a productive knowledge worker; according to previous things I mentioned I am. I just place a question on Linkedin and got answers within ten minutes and answer another one too. What I am trying so say with all of this is that social networking makes one a more productive knowledge worker and creates the ability to help one another out. So therefore I think social networking rocks and not only with reason mentioned above.

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Dutch DevDays 2008

Next week I will attend the Dutch DevDays 2008 at RAI Amsterdam. And according to their site it will give attendees inspiration through international speakers like Daniel Moth and Ingo Rammer. What I noticed in the program is that there are a lot of international speakers this year, which might be the cause that attending it costs nearly 400 euro’s for two days now. Subjects involve .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio, ASP.NET Ajax and Microsoft Office System. No BizTalk unfortunately, it very developer oriented. Still I like to attend tough to keep feeling with technology progress on .NET development and I need some new inspiration.

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SOA and ESB Architecture with BizTalk

Yesterday I found an interesting piece written by Robert Hogg about SOA and ESB Architecture with BizTalk at Wrox. It is an Wrox Blox PDF containing 25 pages about SOA, BizTalk and ESB (Microsoft ESB Guidance). You can purchase it for $7 US, which is not much these days. It is good information and published last February. So if you have not read or heard about it yet, check it out.

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Marketing campain

Marketing campaign of Inter Access has stared and I am in it. When you go to their job portal you will see me in action. I must say a look a little bit awkward on film, but I am happy with the result. Things said in this movie is about YOU architect, where we sell or advocate that one is architect of its own career (success) and this can be made possible at Inter Access. Like in a previous post I mention it was fun to do being in a studio filming. I do realize that this marketing to recruit people, but that is part of the business. Beside YOU architect campaign I myself strongly feel that work one does matters the most together with getting satisfaction out of it. And if one is doing that inside an organization in whatever role or as for instance as a self-employed consultant and feels happy about it than keep doing it. Currently I feel happy what I am doing inside the organization I work for now.

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BizTalk Server Architecture and considerations

I have just returned from a two week holiday (Como Italy) and I was just reviewing my blog and noticed that I haven’t done much posting lately. Well that is about to change and this will be first one of a number of things I would like to share with you regarding some opinions and views around BizTalk Server now in context of approach/business/architecture.

I will first mention that at Inter Access a lot of people and myself have put a lot of effort in an approach for middle sized companies to position BizTalk Server inside their IT landscape or offer a way of implementing integration solutions. The business cases here were whether BizTalk Server can fulfill a role in integration of divers systems like Line-Of-Business (SAP, Oracle eBusiness and J.D. Edwards) or can be placed in center of a service oriented architecture where Microsoft technology is leading. The approach involves a number of steps (activities) to be preformed to reach implementation of a solution or insights (Proof Of Concept) whether BizTalk fits inside the customers IT landscape. Starting point usually is architecture, followed by installation/configuration of BizTalk Server, development, test, acceptation and production environment, implementation, test and deployment. I note here situation is a green field, where customer has little or no knowledge what BizTalk Server is or can do, which is usually the situation I and my colleagues have experienced so far.

From business case a customer presents together with its requirements for a BizTalk implementation or Proof of Concept; architecture is one of the first thing one discusses with customer and colleagues. Therefore I am now going into BizTalk Architecture. As you might know BizTalk Server is based on a messaging sub system and it is capable of doing messaging and/or business process management through its orchestration engine, automated decision engine (which is Business Rules Engine) and business activity monitoring. Below is a picture which outlines some components that can be found inside BizTalk related to other products of Microsoft like SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 and roles involved.

















These products/roles are necessary to install BizTalk and develop solutions with it. BizTalk Server can be installed on one single machine and this kind of installation is preferable only to setup development environments. Visual Studio 2005 (Professional or Team System Foundation) needs to be installed first before BizTalk, so templates for creating pipelines, orchestration, schema’s and maps are available. But what kind of installations would one choose and which editions of BizTalk Server. This depends on the needs (requirements) from the customer. High availability, performance, scalability, number of applications and fail-over. For scaling and fail-over there are some considerations to made in number of servers (CPU). For each server whether in passive or active mode a license has to be purchased. And to have scaling for redundancy or fail-over (availability) or just having more performance, the enterprise edition is the only one suited and comes with a cost of $ 35000 per license. So there are some considerable costs involved having this kind of architecture implemented.

I recommend reading the FAQ at pricing and licensing of BizTalk Server. This also account for number of applications; an application is a logical grouping of all the BizTalk Server design-time artifacts (schemas, maps, pipelines, orchestrations), messaging components (receive ports, receive locations, send ports) and other related items, such as policies that comprise an integrated business process. BizTalk Server applications simplify the deployment and management of BizTalk Server–based solutions.

Other things to consider is which adapters are going to used, because there are difference between adapters (state vs. stateless i.e. persisted in BizTalk or not). Depending on functionality of adapters and scenario’s like high availability clustering plays an important role. One should consider setting up a dedicated SQL Server cluster and active/active cluster of BizTalk (meaning at least two or more active BizTalk Instances; host instances do not need to be clustered). More on clustering and availability can be found at tech net site, which is a great resource for information about clustering and so on. Also MSDN site is a great resource concerning subject high availability.

The number of customers worldwide using BizTalk Server is now probably over 7000 and growing. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has a lot of capabilities and is not limited to messaging or support for business processes only, it now also enables SO(A) and brings more interoperability by supporting native EDI and RFID.

Future will bring us a new update of BizTalk Server 2006 called R3 in 2009 and it will not bear anything concerning Oslo. That will probably in the release after R3, so R3 will be release number 6. It has been announced this month by Steve Martin. I know this is a high overview of BizTalk in context of some possible business cases, but more in depth knowledge can only be achieved by working with BizTalk (experience), reading books, articles, blogs and whitepapers. A lot can be found at Microsoft BizTalk Server site.

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