BizTalk Community series: Introducing Jean-Paul Smit

The stories continue with the BizTalk Community Series that bring BizTalk community members to the foreground. The eight story will be on Jean-Paul Smit. He created one of the productivity enhancing tools for BizTalk solutions; the BizTalk Software Factory. He is also like me an active member of the Dutch BizTalk User Group. I had a little chat with him a while ago and this is his story. 

Jean-Paul Smit lives with his girlfriend and 2 sons of 8 and 10 years old in Hoofddorp, The Netherlands. Since 1997 he has worked with Microsoft products and from 2004 with BizTalk Server. In 2008 he started his own consultancy company to help customers with their integration issues. At the moment he works as a solution architect on the application integration team of a government agency in the Netherlands. Jean-Paul is a BizTalk MCTS and SOA Certified Professional.

Jean-Paul has a broad expertise, yet his focus is on architecture and development in the application integration and cloud area. He has worked in both the developer and architect role on small and large projects. To support the community he started the BizTalk Software Factory project on Codeplex a few years ago. With that tool you can start developing guided and consistent BizTalk solutions, so Jean-Paul is quite familiar with Visual Studio extensions. 

Jean-Paul is very curious about the direction that BizTalk is going in the near future. There is a lot of activity in the Azure area with the Service Bus EAI/EDI initiative. BizTalk is a very traditional platform and he wonders when and if customers will move towards Azure for their integration activities. On the other hand he knows BizTalk is a traditional platform, so it will be around on-premise for several years.
A part of Jean-Paul’s spare time is reserved for studying, researching new technology, writing blog posts and articles. At the moment he is working on an article about the Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI (which is published now) and on achieving the SOA Schools SOA Architect certification (which he has done by now, congrats). Besides that he spends as much time as possible with his kids, because they grow up so fast!

Jean-Paul likes mountain biking a lot and depending on the time available he spends between 2 and 8 hours a week on a bike. In 2011 he decided to spend even more time on a mountain bike and achieved 2 major goals by finishing the long distance of the Salzgammergut Trophy in Austria and the Grand Raid in Switzerland. As he states I quote: “Biking in the mountains is awesome!”
 
His message for the readers of this and other BizTalk related blogs is to keep investing time in BizTalk, also by following this and other blog sites, because he think BizTalk will be around for quite some time.
I would like to thank Jean-Paul for his story and contributions to the community.

Comments

Tord Glad Nordahl said…
Jean-Paul is a great asset to the community! Great interview Steef-Jan and a great last tip Jean-Paul.
2:00 AM
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