I suppose I should give a little background on myself before I start blogging to give my posts some context. Before Microsoft I was designing and developing parts of foreign exchange transaction systems for Reuters. I started at Microsoft about 7 years ago as a software design engineer on Windows working on the index server. I spent much of my time porting the code to 64-bit. As the year 2000 approached Microsoft was pushing harder into the Enterprise market with the 2000 series of products (Windows, SQL, BizTalk, Host Integration Server, and Commerce Server) on the horizon. I was fortunate enough to get a position as an Enterprise Solutions Architect working closely with customers designing systems built on pre-released bits of Microsoft platforms and applications helping make them successful on Microsoft products and getting feedback of our findings back into the product teams. I have been able to work closely with financial, telecommunication, retail and many other types of companies architecting solutions to work with our latest applications.
Now I am part of the Business Process and Integration division still working closely with customers on design wins and architectures but now mostly with projects using BizTalk Server 2004. While working in this position I have been able to experience both sides of our products; getting the customers’ perspectives and understanding the product group’s inner workings.
In this blog I am planning on sharing some of these experiences and findings. We sometimes discover that users don’t understand parts of the system, or didn’t know that they had to architect their system in a particular way (for example, many users don’t realize that the master secret server must be clustered for a high availability build out). I will use this blog to share some of that information as well.
There are some folks from the BizTalk team who are already blogging:
Scott Woodgate
Kevin Smith
Lee (the dude) Graber (BizTalk Core Engine)
Eldar Musayev
They already have some excellent posts and I would recommend looking at them as well.
Enjoy,
Kevin