Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

8 and 9 march I will be attending the exclusive integration master class with some of my colleagues at Microsoft near Schiphol Airport. This master class will be about a number of technologies concerning integration like BizTalk Server, SQL Server Integration Server, Host Integration Server and Microsoft Windows Foundation. Besides technology architectural scenarios will be discussed taking scalability, performance, latency and fault tolerance in to account. Microsoft consultants will be the speakers during this master class. My colleagues and I are very interested what this master class will bring us in Microsoft insights about EAI and their technologies. Hence integration of different information systems is complex and brings a lot of challenges. I have experienced that during a number of EAI projects in the past. Well I am looking forward this week to the master class. I will post my experiences after this event .

This post is about adapters delivered by BizTalk. Through adapters of this toolset of Microsoft heterogeneous connectivity can be achieved. In a previous post I mentioned the adapters delivered by Host Integration Server 2006, the article about it will be published in June edition of the Dutch .NET Magazine. These adapters can be found here . Adapters for Oracle, SAP, Siebel can be found here as a download , so one can install them and can connect to these systems. Using the adapters in a solution one is preparing the first step is usually configuring connection for instance to DB2 (see picture). Followed by this step can be security, ecetera. Important with working with connecting to other systems like DB2 or Oracle, is permissions. One needs to have the proper permission to connect to the system, but also to for instance query views or tables in a DB2 or Oracle database. Having the proper permission can be checked when going though the adapter wizard (see figure below). More about a...

T oday I passed the TS: Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions by Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006. Was it hard? Well I did the Beta last year and I failed by 651 score, because I was not quite strong on BAM and BRE. BRE was no problem this time and I strongly improved on BAM, so the score was 957 this time. So for an experienced BizTalk professional it is not a difficult exam. So if one wants to do the exam I would suggest lots of hands on experience, books like Foundation of BizTalk or BizTalk Pro are good help (see my previous posts) also look at preparation guide . Finally there is also a compiled help file for BizTalk 2006, where you will find everything about the product together with great walkthroughs and tutorials (I strongly recommend).