Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

A new BizTalk Server eBook is available for the 2013 R2 version with the focus on extensibility. Together with Johann Cooper and Eldert Grootenboer I have written on various aspects of extensibility with BizTalk Server. The .NET framework adds tremendous value in extending BizTalk Server solutions to create more versatile, robust solutions. We discuss the extensibility for BizTalk Server from a holistic view around the following topics: - Ports - Orchestrations - BRE - BAM - Deployment - Operations - Tooling The eBook is available through the BizTalk360 website. The journey started after my first webcast BizTalk Extensibility for the Integration Monday a year ago in February 2015. At first I did not have any plans to pursue anything after that talk. However, a few months later I got in touch with Johann Cooper, who I interviewed for my blog and met in person in 2014 during my visit to Australia. We discussed opportunities of writing a book for a well-known publisher...

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 ...

April 13-14 London the BizTalk Summit 2015 , the third time this event is organized by the world renowned BizTalk monitoring product: BizTalk360 . Integration has it’s momentum now, as the IT-landscape has changed completely with the evolution of the cloud, growth of devices and being connected to everything and anything. Information Technology has reached a completly new level, where we as people are connected and consume tons of data to process and interpret. Connectivity has become key to enable us to be connected. This means applications, systems and services need to integrate (communicate) with each other to exchange data. Data that resides in multiple places. We will not see all data move to the cloud. Reasons are privacy, regulations and divers laws. This is another main driver for integration as data needs to be pushed around. In London you will hear and learn about Microsoft’s evolving (cloud) application platform, Microsoft Azure with its numerous services, BizTalk Server...

BizTalk360 is a full featured BizTalk Server Monitoring & Operations product. The product has matured from a small web based monitoring tool to a full blown feature rich product for monitoring BizTalk Server. The product includes features for BizTalk Operation support people like the Throttling analyzer, Topology Viewer, and Backup DR Monitor. Recently a new version 7.8 has been released with another set of valuable features: Advanced Process Monitoring and dashboard EDI reporting capabilities in line with BizTalk Admin Console. System Profile: Ability to remove features you don’t want in BizTalk360. User Profile: Flexibility to set custom time zone and date/time format for each user. Removed Orphaned artifacts from Monitoring: Ability to remove old orphaned artifacts like Applications, which no longer exist in the environment. If you haven’t heard of BizTalk360 than you will like this blog post as it will explain how you can easily evaluate the tool by yourself and ...

There will be another BizTalk Summit event in august in Australia. The early bird tickets are on sale now until the end of this month! The event will take place in three different cities: Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. I will be speaking at each of the events together with fellow MVP’s Saravana Kumar, Michael Stephenson, Bill Chesnut, Mikael Hakansson and Mick Badran on various topics around integration with the Microsoft technology stack: Microsoft Azure, BizTalk Service, BizTalk Server 2013 R2, Mobile, Office365, and BizTalk360. My talk will specifically go into Microsoft Azure BizTalk Service, what it offers today, what scenarios can be supported, development-, deployment-, and operation perspective of this cloud service. Session is called: Hitchhiker's guide to integration with Microsoft Azure BizTalk Service and the actual abstract: Microsoft Azure BizTalk Service (MABS) is almost available to us for a year. It is a newcomer in the world of integration Platform a...

A dear friend of mine has been working hard on a developer productivity add in for BizTalk projects in Visual Studio 2012. He name is Nino Crudele a Microsoft Integration MVP from Italy. Steef-Jan, Sandro, and Nino Palazzo Gotico in Piacenza, October 2013. The add in is called BTSG NoS . Nino started with the add in creation started last year after he thought it was time someone cared about developer productivity in BizTalk. Since there has been not any enhancements the last years in the BizTalk Server product regarding productivity Nino took matters in his own hands. The add in is almost ready for a public beta. At the moment the add in is vigorously tested by fellow Microsoft Integration MVP Sandro Perreira . And he recently created a few post about the add in: How to install BTSG NoS Addin for Visual Studio 2012 What is BTSG NoS Addin purpose and what features are available? (Part 1) What is BTSG NoS Addin purpose and what features are available? (Part 2) More posts...

The beginning of March I will be touring Europe speaking at different user groups and a huge event the BizTalk Summit 2014. The latter is in London on the 3rd and 4th of March. During this event I will be sharing the stage with eleven other Microsoft Integration MVP's and four Microsoft Product Group members. There are still a few tickets left: http://www.biztalk360.com/BizTalk-Summit-2014/index.html My talk during the tour will be on management aspect of Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS). WABS is one of the new services on the Windows Azure Cloud platform. It’s a service that offers integration and EDI capabilities in the cloud. An important aspect of any cloud service is the manageability aspect. In this session the focus lies on this aspect for the BizTalk Services. How does one manage a BizTalk Services solution, what are the tools and resources in Azure to leverage to get a good overview of the BizTalk Service and it’s solutions. Those questions will be answered in thi...

Last week I held a presentation at the  Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event (26 - 27 September). This was one of the biggest BizTalk events organized in the Nordic countries this year. Four BizTalk MVP's together with two distinguished community members presented two full days on BizTalk Server, Service Bus, BizTalk Administration and BizTalk360 (Monitoring). I shared the stage during this days with fellow BizTalk MVP's  Sandro Pereira , Saravana Kumar , and Nino Crudele together with Tord G. Nordahl and Lex Hegt . Bouvet organized this event for the first time in Norway. Previously BizTalk innovation events were organized in Utrecht (The Netherlands) and  Milan (Italy). The venue was the Bouvet office in Stavanger . Bouvet is a Scandinavian consultancy company, which delivers development and advisory services relating to information technology, interactive communication and enterprise management. Their strengths are broad expertise, ...

BizTalk360 evolves to be a more and more mature product. In past I and other BizTalk MVP’s have written stories on this monitoring product (I used to call it a tool, but it has gone that stage it’s a product and a very good one). I have been impressed by it since the first time it almost a year ago. On Saravana’s blog you find a detailed overview what is new in this 3.1 release. On my VM I have 2.5.790.0 version, which I uninstalled before installing the 3.1.335.0 version i.e. public beta. And I must say this was an easy process lasting only a few minutes. Only thing I needed to do is deleted the BizTalk360 database in my SQL Server database.The msi installer has been improved . One of the new feature is the graphical end-to-end message flow viewer . I tested this by enabling tracking in one of my orchestrations. I enabled all tracking options in ports and orchestration. I ran a message through orchestration and went to BizTalk360 Tracking Data Queries and click pipeline (XmlReceiv...

Saravana has released new version of BizTalk 360, a version 2.5 release with following important features/enhancements: Role Based Security Knowledge Base Repository Message Box Viewer Integration Message Detail (Content/Context) Alert/Notification Enhancements It shows that BizTalk360 has more monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities. In this blog post I will focus on troubleshooting capability: MessageBox Viewer Integration . Many of you have heard of the BizTalk MsgBoxViewer tool that has been around for some time. It has been created by Jean-Pierre Auconie . The tool runs a set of tests and queries against the MessageBox database of your BizTalk Server. The results are displayed in the tool and can also be exported as HTML reports including links. I wondered how this integration works with BizTalk360.After installing BizTalk360 V2.5 I looked for the feature. I clicked Settings –> Configure MBV Integration . You will see that you need to install the MessageBox V...