Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

Last few hours before 2016 ends and what a year it has been as so many things happened. The year started off with finalizing and publishing an eBook on extensibility of BizTalk Server, which is available for free. My buddy Saravana made available through BizTalk360 website. The publishing of the book marked the first major milestone in 2016. The collaboration of Eldert , Johann and myself as authors and three awesome reviewers in Mark , James and Sandro delivered a 150-page book on the power of .NET and BizTalk. With the release of the book, Eldert and myself embarked on a speaking tour to promote the book, which we did in front of the BizTalk User Group in the Netherlands, online through integration Monday and in Sweden (Stockholm, Gothenburg). Thanks Mikael , Johan and Peter !!! In the spring (May) I presented at Integrate 2016 on IoT end to end leveraging the Microsoft Azure Platform services. And this was in front of almost 400 people. Who would ...

Just recently Microsoft has released its tenth version of BizTalk Server: BizTalkServer 2016. This latest version will bring the cloud closer to the enterprises with connectivity to Azure Service Logic Apps. The Logic App adapter will close the gap with regards to connectivity with SaaS solutions. The Logic Apps has a myriad of connectors of various SaaS solutions like Dropbox, GitHub, Marketo, Salesforce and with Azure Services like DocDb, Machine Learning and Functions. SaaS connectors that will grow in numbers in the near future and connectors to Azure Services. Connectors that provide connectivity to anything, anywhere, which is basically the key driver for integration. Hence the centralizing Logic Apps and BizTalk Server at the heart of Microsoft’s Enterprise Integration Platform. We have arrived in the digital age, where applications and data is everywhere. With all types of devices, we are connected 24/7 and surrounded by data we consume...

A new version of BizTalk360 has been released, version 8 which comes with a boatload of features and a complete overhaul of its user interface to provide an exceptional user experience. The product adopted a concept of widgets in the dashboard similar to the new Microsoft Azure portal. A BizTalk 360 user can now create and customize dashboards for different use cases. The User Interface, Dashboards and Widgets. In this post I will review a few of the new features and let’s kick off with the UI, which has improved dramatically. Intially BizTalk360 was a Silverlight application before it migrated to HTML 5. And in version 8.0 it has adjusted to what you experience on the Azure Portal and what you see with UI in devices. Below you see a customized dashboard with several widgets. Figure 1. An example of my customized monitoring dashboard. The end user has also the ability to create his own custom widgets via the settings page. Picture ...