To start things off: Happy holidays! We are almost at the end of the year 2012. Before that is a fact I would like to one final story for BizTalk Community Series this year.

The story of today will be on my colleague from motion10 Sander Nefs. We have been collaborating on a few projects in the past and are currently working on a project at a big online retailer. Sander is a young and smart BizTalk professional. He has a blog on BizTalk for a few years now. From time to time he posts very useful information on BizTalk.

Sander is a BizTalk consultant at motion10. Like me he works on different BizTalk projects. He would describe his job as follows:

My job consists of involvement albeit architecting-designing/developing integration based solutions using BizTalk Server in basically all phases of projects, like POC’s, presentations, designs, implementations etc.  (Unless you ask my parents, they will say I’m a PC doctor :).

Sander is usually involved in different phases of the project. During the project he more involved with the architecture, design and development. He considers this as a nice position to be in. It allows him to design and later validate that design of the solution. This helps in evaluating what works and what can be improved. In the future projects Sander plans to focus more on designing solutions with new technologies that are similar with BizTalk. In his last project he saw a lot of scenarios on how to apply patterns and components like the ESB Toolkit, which helped a lot in determining ideal solutions and capabilities of handling business requirements.

Sander has the following to say about BizTalk:

“I think BizTalk is a cool product, which allows you from day one to be productive starting. Besides that BizTalk is extremely flexible. I like to the idea of going to a customer, ask about their scenarios, lay-out the options and get into business without any headache because you know you bring a suite of useful facilities to the table which are reliable, fast, efficient and flexible, without any coding. You can develop and entire solution and now it just works, more power required. Let’s scale out, more logic required. Let’s define some rules, more logging/analysis required Let’s use BAM. The list goes on and on.”

And on his projects:

“When I was involved in integration projects before using C# and web services, a lot had to be custom developed, which is time-consuming, I’m still happy with BizTalk when a customer has a list of requirements and you have 3 days to prove that BizTalk is capable, until now. It certainly is.”

During his spare time Sander is very busy with sports. He at least swims and plays squash once a week. Tries other sports and is in for a challenge. For instance last summer he tried to master ’staying on a Wakeboard for a full lap’ at a cable runway. He succeeded and is determined to do it again next summer. Besides sports he likes to have a good time in the weekend like going out for drinks (e.g. Belgium caf%u00e9), clubbing, see a movie etc.

A final quote from Sander:

“To all readers I would like to say, thanks for taking the time to get better, read about experiences from others and I hope that you will be inspired to share your knowledge as well, as experience is what helps in getting better, quicker and making it easier go really dive into problems and solve them. I’m trying to share my experiences with the purpose to help myself and others and I hope that others will follow up on this.”

I would like to thank Sander for his time and contributions to the community.

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Cheers, Steef-Jan