Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

The BizTalk Community is a fantastic bunch of professionals. During last two years I had the opportunity to meet many of them in person and conduct interviews with them. I interviewed close to 30 BizTalk professionals around the world. End of 2011 I had an idea based on the four interview series from Richard Seroter to do a similar thing focusing solely on the BizTalk Community itself. I asked advice from Richard and started with the first interview in January 2012. The goal was to introduce and bring several active BizTalk Community members to the foreground. For each interview conducted I asked the following questions: Who are you and what do you do for a living? What’s your BizTalk expertise (developing, administration, architecture) and what do like/think about the BizTalk Server product? What do you like to do in your spare time? What sport(s) you like to practice and/or sport team/individual you favor/support (i.e. Ice hockey team, skating, skiing pro, soccer team ......

Tomorrow there will be another BizTalk event . Venue will be Microsoft Italy in Milan. I will be speaking there with other Microsoft Integration MVP’s, Microsoft and people from Microsys (main sponsor). This will be another opportunity to engage the BizTalk community. Interactions with the BizTalk community are vital to keep us MVP’s focused. We can be viewed as an intermediary between them and the Product Group. Besides that we love to share our knowledge, experience and views on integration. In of my previous engagements I met M.R. Ashwinprabu . This was in London, during the BizTalk Summit London 2013 . Today’s story will be about M.R. Ashwinprabu . He lives with his wife in the UK . They recently moved from beautiful Bath to Reading . In their spare time they talk to their parents back in India , watch movies, long walks and taste different kind of foods. “I like to know things happening around me, I spend time reading news. I am more interested in political news especially ...

It is time to continue the BizTalk Community Series after a recent successful event in Norway, the Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Day . This event was a great opportunity for me to meet up with many Scandinavian BizTalk professionals. During the two day event we as BizTalkCrew , Kent Weare and Paolo Salvatori (Microsoft) presented about the latest (Windows Azure BizTalk Services, BizTalk 2013), proven technology (Windows Azure Service Bus, BizTalk Mapping, Best Practices and Proactive Monitoring) and BizTalk360 . Today’s story in the series will be on a newcomer in the BizTalk Community, who has recently contributed some great articles on the TechNet Wiki, Suleiman Shakhtour . Suleiman is 31 years old and married to the wonderful Aseel. They have recently moved to one of the most beautiful cities in Turkey : Istanbul and will soon be expecting their first baby. It would not be a surprise that they are now do al lot of sightseeing and discover a lot of new places in this wonderful ...

Holidays are over and I enjoyed my stay in Spanish Pyrenees and France ( Béziers ). In case you ever visit the Spanish Pyrenees you might see sights like this when hiking through the mountains. Now back to reality. Sun has stop shining (it will return Thursday though) here in the Netherlands and it is back work. Today’s story in this post will be on Richard Hallgren , who works as a Solution Architect at iBiz Solutions , a specialized consultancy company with about 20 employees (and growing). It mainly focuses on integration and data centric solutions based on Microsoft and Tibco technology. iBiz has a number of larger customers spread all over Scandinavia continent. “In my role as a Solution Architect I'm usually responsible for the overall architecture, making sure we follow best practices such as having automated builds, automated tests, a clear strategy, clear requirements, documentation platforms, working source code workflows etc, etc. Basically making sure we have ...

It’s summertime and we are experiencing  heat waves combined with days or rain and clouds here in the Netherlands. I am working at customers, while it’s hot outside, preparing for my marathon in Berlin (end of September) and a few talks for later this year (Norway, Italy). The community is still going strong and a lot of them are contributing through different channels. One of community members is S cott Banwart and today’s story is about him. Scott is 36 years old and lives in Akron , Ohio in the U.S.A. He is the Technology Manager and part-owner of StoneDonut , LLC. “We are a boutique consulting firm specializing in integration, SOA and BPM. In my role as Technology Manager I act as our technical architect, lead developer and manager of our development team.” Scott is a geek to the core, so when he is not writing code for work he can be found writing code for fun. “I like to experiment with other integration-related technologies to find new ways to solve problems. Cu...

Recently I visited fellow Microsoft Integration MVP Nino Crudele in Italy and met with some of his fellow BizTalk colleagues. I am amazed by work Nino and his fellow country man put in for the (local) community and their customers. The same dedicated I see in my own country. One of them is Eldert Grootenboer . Today’s story is about him. Eldert is 30 years old, and lives in Rijen in Brabant , together with his wife Angelique. Both being big fans of rock and metal, they try to regularly visit concerts and festivals in their free time. Another metal music fan like myself and from the beautiful province Brabant. Besides enjoying the wonderful world of heavy metal Eldert likes to get his hands dirty on new technologies, both in the integration world, like Azure BizTalk Services, as well as in general .NET. “Also, having grown up on a ship, I still like to spend time on ships, and also do some work for a shipping company in my spare time, ranging from building computers to programmi...

It’s spring time and the sun is shining. BizTalk Server has been released and a lot of events are organized or are about to take place; launch parties, user group meeting and large events like TechEd’s. The BizTalk community is vibrant. A lot of us MVP’s will be on stage coming weeks at these different events. We are joined by people from the community. One of them is Rob Fox . Today’s story is on him. Rob , living together in the south of The Netherlands with his lovely girlfriend Marjolein, a dog and two cats. He works as a BizTalk Consultant for QNH and if he has any time left he likes to build apps for the Windows (Phone) environment. “The last one is just for fun. Making money out of it is pretty difficult if you are not busy with it full time.”  Besides spending time with Marjolein, walking the dog, building an app or the occasional website, Rob also does (Front-of-House) sound and tour management for one of Holland's bigger metal bands - Carach Angren . “It...

This month I will be introducing two BizTalk community members from France. Almost two weeks ago I introduced Maxime Labelle and today the story will be on Jérémy Ronk . Jérémy is a young married man, who lives near Paris. He is an active swimmer and likes to hike in the mountains. In his spare time he does all sorts of things like studying other technologies than BizTalk such as StreamInsight , photography, gardening and woodworking. Jérémy has been a BizTalk professional for 4 years now and January of this year he got a role as an Integration architect. As for his career he says the following: “As far as my expertise is concerned, I have been working on each domain. I started developing some basic artifacts, maps, orchestration... Then, I got some more interesting issue which required me to develop a custom pipeline, create a correlation, using BAM.... My knowledge grows up month after month about the BizTalk world. At the same time, I discovered administration tasks and op...

I was pretty busy last couple of weeks preparing for my integration session for Lead Architect Program Norway. I will more or less teaching a class full of students about integration with Microsoft Integration stack. My focus will be on Windows Azure Service Bus and BizTalk Server 2013. The day before I will head over to Norway I would like to share another story with a BizTalk community member. I was in Paris beginning of the month and I will be focusing on France BizTalk Community this month. Today’s story will be on fellow Microsoft Integration MVP Maxime Labelle a software architect and developer, who has been involved in software development on the Microsoft Platform for more than 15 years. “I'm mostly interested in science and technology and that's why I chose to work in computer science which, I feel, is one of a few areas where it's possible to "create" things starting from a simple idea.” Maxime lives in Paris , France , with his wife and three...

The BizTalk community is awesome. I get to spend time with many of them during my travels abroad when speaking to them. A week ago I had the opportunity to speak in Porto during the Oporto BizTalk Innovation event. My upcoming next BizTalk events in Italy (June) and Norway (September) are planned and its preparations have already started. BizTalk Server 2013 will soon be generally available as it is in RTM right now . I believe many BizTalk professionals that have access to MSDN and must have downloaded and installed it already on a VM. Like one of my colleagues, who has already posted a nice article on which possible issues you might run into when installing the 2013 RTM. The story today for the BizTalk community series will be on Mitch VanHelden , who also recently blogged on the RTM release . Mitch is 27 years old, married to Anne-Lore and has two lovely kids (a 4-year old boy Lars and a 2-year old daughter Chloë). He lives with his family in a small town called Rot...

Many of my fellow Integration MVP’s are active within the BizTalk community. This also accounts for some of my colleagues at motion10 . There are more companies in the world that have a number of their professionals active within communities. The beginning of this year I interviewed Mark Brimble from Datacom . He is not the only Datacom professional that is active within the BizTalk community. His colleague Johann Cooper for instance is just as active. Today’s story is on him. Johann has been a Senior BizTalk developer at Datacom for the last year, and he is really enjoying the opportunity to establish and implement best practices with some of the country's top talent in the field.  Prior to that he used to work at Ports of Auckland Ltd. for six years where his career progressed from being more of a support oriented application specialist to a professional with a strong focus on .Net and BizTalk development. Aside from work and blogging, Johann’s spare time has mostly been...

A few weeks ago I presented at the London BizTalk Summit 2013 . During this event I met a few BizTalk professionals face to face, which I interviewed in the past for these community series. I for instance met Naushad Alam and Stuart Brierly . I also ran into Colin Meade . Colin is a Senior Integration Consultant working for Spanish Point Technologies in Ireland . He is originally from Dublin , but he now lives in Belfast with his wife and daughter. Before he started his career in IT he aspired to be a full-time musician. “Unfortunately, I soon realized playing guitar in a melodic death metal band wasn't going to pay the bills :-), so I decided to change the focus. Despite this, music still plays a massive role outside work and family life; whether it’s chilling out to a few tunes, playing guitar or going to a live gig.” Like Colin I am a huge metal fan too, however I played the bass for a while and played in a band for a few weeks yet I was not cut out to be in a ba...