This week I attended TechEd Europe in Amsterdam. Accompanying me was Mikael Sand, a BizTalk professional from Sweden. I have met Mikael a couple times before and we always have some good discussions over BizTalk, beer, politics and sports. This time I have asked him some questions for the BizTalk Community Series and here is his story.

Mikael Sand, a 30-something integration architect specializing on the Microsoft stack. He lives just south of Stockholm with his wife Catarina and 4-year old son Gabriel.

Mikael’s expertise is what he would like to call “the flow of the message”. He is constantly thinking in flows and services. Mikael’s primary tool for implementing these flows is of course BizTalk Server and quite often he resorts to using that for all the work he does, so I guess the short answer is Mikael is an architect.

Mikael’s opinion on BizTalk is:

“BizTalk as a product is, what I would like to call “incomplete”. There are still a lot of room for improvement with tooling, tracking for instance. The schema editor has looked the same since the 2004 version.”

“What I like about it is the next to no amount of code you usually need to write. Other integration engines I have seen makes you write code and quite often the same code over and over again. This is for instance the case of Azure Service Bus at the moment. A more “configure driven” approach might be on the way.”

Mikael has recently bought a house that now pretty much consumes his free time. What is left he uses to sing as he is a tenor in a local choir. As for sports Mikael does not really follow any particular sport. However, near his old home town of Gothenburg there is a football team that he likes. The “Angels” or “Blue white” has sparked his interest since he was very young. Yet he also likes American football, which he would like to say is his favorite sport. Mikael watches it whenever he can. From time to time he will try to catch a baseball game as well.

To the readers of this blog Mikael would like to say that they have found a very useful resource in the internet when it comes to BizTalk, the past and the future. To the readers of his blog he would say: “Thank you for visiting I really hope I can help. I get quite a lot of hits but I have no idea what they are reading.”

Mikael thanks for your contributions to the community and your story. It has been great fun hanging out with you during the TechEd in Amsterdam.

Cheers,

- Steef-Jan