Second Day Microsoft SOA & BPM Conference

Last day of condensed Microsoft SOA & BPM Conference 2009. This morning I followed a session around BAM and from then on I went to:

• Architectural session : SOA Governance with MS technologies: System Center, WCF and BTS;
• Overview of BPM: Realizing the BPM Vision with SOA, Sharepoint and BizTalk;
• EDI Session: Using SOA Principles to drive Modern EDI Solutions;
• Closing Keynote by Robert Wahbe.

Architectural session was not really about SOA Governance, but discussion around Broker Pattern, Dynamic Routing and EAI.

As you can see in the slide .NET (WCF), BizTalk Server play a important role in pattern of Dynamic Routing. Next session by Burley Kawazaki was high level overview of BPM, how slow adoption to it is today and how approach could be to enhance adoption and apply by using Visio, SharePoint Designer, BizTalk Server 2009 and MOSS (Dashboard, Performance Point Server). Basically it was a sales pitch to show Microsoft has a complete stack of technology to implement BPM solutions. See SOA website about People ready Process Platform. It resembles what the message was from this session.

EDI Session divided into enhancements of EDI inside BizTalk with a SOA perspective in mind. I am not an EDI expert so it is hard to tell if enhancements (improvements) are great. I was interested in it to see how component of BizTalk (EDI) works in B2B scenario’s.

Last but not least the closing keynote by Robert Wahbe (Coporate VP): SOA and the Cloud. Software Plus Services, Platform evolution (agility and cost), Power of Choice, Azure Services Platform, Building for Scale, Windows Azure (with an demo by James Conard, people who attended PDC 2008 will know this demo or look at my post), .NET Services (with demo by James Conrad), Cloud Services Scenarios, Open Cloud Platform, and Roadmap (Commercial available in 2009) these are topics Robert talked about during his session.

It was good conference for me. I saw some good sessions, talk to a lot people like Jason Hogg, Brain Loesgen, Don Box, Jon Flanders, Sam VanHoutte, Bermard Budde, Harry Tolsma, Gijsbert in ‘t Veld and other Dutch/American conference attendees. It was worthwhile, and I have enough ideas and challenges for next couple of months with material and information I got. Next stop Toronto Canada to see relatives and friends before I travel home.

Technorati:SOAMicrosoft SOA and BPM Conference

BAM to Implement Service and SLA Monitoring

Raul Camacho, SOA Solution Architect from Microsoft, did a talk about BAM to implement a service and SLA monitoring solution. Session is focused to IT pro to monitor BizTalk. Service Analytics use BAM, WCF and so on. What is Service Analytics.

Why Services Analytics? For this is new (terminology) and concept. Slogan: one manages what one measures. This is to provide answers to the business around availability, performance, consumption and profitability. So it can help to identify dependencies. Approach of speaker (Microsoft) to real world scenario’s were, see slide below.

To create observation model one can use Excel (Bam add-in after installation/configuration of BizTalk). With Bam API, event stream, one can send data into database (BAM Database). Once in database one can do whatever it wants (cubes, reporting and so on).

Than Raul gave a demo at least he tried, but mouse did not work (so no demo yet). So he went to talk about challenges one can face.

Mouse is working :) Now demos started using platform components (see slide platform components).

Then an End to End demo.

So this was for me very interesting to see what one can do with BAM (eye opener) in perspective of monitoring and using WCF.

Look at codeplex at end of February the end to end demo (code) and so will be available (MSE). Also look at BAM Whitepaper (see previous post).

Technorati:BizTalk 2006 R2BizTalk Server 2006 R2BizTalkBusiness Activity Monitoring

ALM Experience for BizTalk Server 2009 Developers

Next talk after this morning talk is the new Application LifeCycle Management experience for BizTalk Developer session by Stephen Kaufman. This session will dive into deep integration with Team Foundation Server and ALM. It started with a retrospective to what happing now with build, deploy, testing and debugging of orchestrations or mappings. This things are tedious and slowing down developers these days when using BizTalk 2006 R2 or lesser versions. New features of BizTalk Server 2009 are listed below in the slide (same as previous session).

What is ALM Experience? It is defined as in slide below.

 

And it benefits through increased business value (see my post about value proposition). It improves team results and brings indeed added value. This is demoed by co-speaker Vinay Ahuja in demo called BizTalkALM. Source Control for instance is completely integrated and functions better than source control in conjunction with previous versions of BizTalk (as soon in demo).

Next session went into developer experience with a list of enhancements.

Project file is different and looks like C# project file as mentioned before. These things can be seen as one will use BizTalk CTP (see sandbox implementation).

TFS integration can be seen in for instance unit testing. One can create unit tests for Maps, Schemas and Pipelines. HAT has gone (into BizTalk administration mmc).

   

 

This was demoed to visualize testing and debugging. Last topic was MSBuild and this was demoed as well.

So I definitely recommend to download CTP of BizTalk and create an VPC of environment with Visual Studio TFS and so on to try and experience the new features and enhancements.

Technorati: ALM BizTalk Server 2009

Integration Solution : BizTalk Server 2009

There is an need for an Application Server and Integration Server in SOA space. First basic what is word integrate mean:

Content for talk today is why? (challenges: what will BizTalk solve), What? (Scenario’s capabilities), Who? and What’s new” (Now BizTalk 2009 and future); and Why is it important? Talk is focused to more with BizTalk! Landscape is changing, domain EAI is not new, where to unify systems and share data. Historic time line is displayed below:

BizTalk plays a role in latter to. What does BizTalk solve?

Summarized in IT Business Challenges.

In the big picture it comes down to real world SOA. So it is people (consumers) and technology (supply data) to compositions (offer functionality).

Common scenario’s for BizTalk are displayed below.

BizTalk Server Workloads divided in six types (what can be done with BizTalk).

Customer video Oncology Hematology Associates (Electronic Patient Dossier); Good video something for Dutch Health Care Secretary to convince them to make this happen (in The Netherlands a lot of discussion going on of doing this or not; privacy is a big issue!).

Ok what’s new in BizTalk Server 2009 and beyond! First previous BizTalk Server versions were discussed; continuous release every two year (except for alignment with Visual Studio :() What are the enhancement? It is divided in four area’s.

BizTalk is now like c# project. So BizTalk projects now in Visual Studio is aligned to c# project type of development in conjunction with VSTS and TFS. Application LifeCycle Management will now apply also on BizTalk projects.

At the end there was a demo of BizTalk Server 2009 (Retailer scenario: Contoso :)). Finally why now BizTalk? You will get more out of the product, automate to reduce cost and error, innovation (competition), integrate to eliminate redundancy, and provide tighter compliance. Good talk and overview, commercial based tough and not much demo (at least things one with a CTP has not seen already or done).

Technorati:BizTalk Server 2009

SOA & BPM Conference Keynote

Conference has started. It was kicked off by Eddie Amos. Even though there is a financial crisis going on and conference has been made condensed to 2 days :( there are:

• 400 attendees
• 25 countries
• 25 breakout sessions

The it started of with Steve Martin debunking the myths around SOA. Is dead or alive? A lot of hype around it being alive or dead (see Anne Thomas Manes). Here are some myths:

• Does SOA stops at Firewall? No it begins at the firewall.
• SOA Aligns the Business and IT... No, it is about the how to implement SOA.
• Alignment between IT and Business is done through people not technology (how). SOA Goverance fixes everthing... No it needs to expands all of IT not just SOA (true).
• Corny one SOA will teach children learn to read (haha).

So judging from Steve Martin's talk SOA is alive; we are just at the beginning!!!

Microsoft will be bring technology to get us there:

WCF, WF, IIS/Dublin, Windows Azure Services Platform.

Microsoft invested a lot of money in cloud computing (i.e. datacenters and technology).

Good talk from Steve Martin.

HP Mark Davis Partner perspective for SOA.

SOA Foundation:

Basically High level talk about SOA inside commercial flight (AirSOA). Next some more around SOA from customer perspective like Boeing, Chevron and MacDonald's. Some introduction to audience and then questions were asked by speaker Eddie Amos.

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