BizTalk 2006 Review at ZDNET Australia

by community-syndication | Aug 28, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Mario D’Silva our local Exchange Specialist alerted me to a review of BizTalk 2006 at ZDNET Australia. Thanks Mario! Find it here

Ozzie TechEd 2006 – My Session on Integrating BizTalk 2006 and Windows Workflow Foundation

by community-syndication | Aug 28, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve been working on a solution now for almost 14 months that is basically BizTalk 2006 and Windows Workflow Foundation (we started on Windows Workflow in alpha), and I’ve come up with a solid framework where BizTalk and Windows Workflow complement each other very well.

Unlike the standard Workflow Message of “For ‘Enterprise’ solutions, SAP integration
etc. use BTS, for everything else use Workflow…”

My session was on using BizTalk as a Framework and Workflow providing ‘pluggable’
pieces of the solutions.
(One day I’ll get to writing this up in full)

• BizTalk provides the Solution/Message Flow
• Workflow provides the State Flow and Transition Logic

Here’s the

BTS
WWF Integration.zip (686.1 KB)

Teched Australia 2006 Recap – Business Process and Integration Landscape

by community-syndication | Aug 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I thought I’d take some time to capture some of my thoughts for each of the sessions I was lucky enough to be involved in this year.

This was my third session at Teched and was very fortunate to have Paul Woods from Data#3 and Steve Maw from Formfill with me on this session. My main objective for this session was really to get Paul and Steve an opportunity to present how they used BizTalk in context of;

(a) How a partner has built a process centric BizTalk solution for their client

(b) How an ISV has used BizTalk as an enabling technology for their market leading application called FlowTalk.

Each of these solutions use BizTalk to manage highly complex business process scenarios. It’s not about core messaging, that’s a means to an end. Where you start getting real success is modelling processes and providing visibility layers on top of those processes.

This was a great session, and although it was a level 100 session was very well received. There were plenty of questions and feedback afterwards so thanks to everyone who attended.  There was about 50 of you present, but we only received 4 official evaluations. If you have any other feedback, please let me know! Many after the session commented on how they got perspectives on how not only BizTalk was being used to solve requirements but the MS stack working together.

The overall scores were;

Overall Results

Thanks again to Paul and Steve and thank you all for your time at Teched this year! See you throughout the year, and thats me signing out for my feedback of my three sessions. Please do let me know if there is anything we can do to improve your experiences!

Teched Australia 2006 Recap – BizTalk Server 2006 and Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005

by community-syndication | Aug 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I thought I’d take some time to capture some of my thoughts for each of the sessions I was lucky enough to be involved in this year.

This was my second session at Teched and was lucky enough to have Nick Ward by my side who is our national SQL specialist. Through dialog with most of the customers I deal with in the BizTalk world, BAM is often under utilized  – if at all – so I thought that trying to do a session on using BAM and then also surfacing aggregated data through BSM would be valuable to the audience. We had about 50 people in this session, and 10 of you posted final evaluations.

Generally, most of you who responded found the information somewhat useful although some of you felt I could have done a better job. Thanks for your feedback. I questioned in my preparation whether it would be useful to actually do a demo and then show how the demo was pieced together v actually build an entire BAM scenario from scratch. I chose the 1st, but it may have been more valuable to do the 2nd in hindsight. We did position this as a level 200 (i.e. basic technical) but it appears as though people would have liked some more detail in the session as 3 of the 10 said it was not technical enough.

One of you found the presentation completely ineffective, which is OK, but I would appreciate some face to face time if you felt so strongly compelled to write that. Others found the session very useful and relevant. Either way, thanks again for your feedback. The overall scores were;

Overall Results

I have posted the presentation to my site for now – so if you want to take a look, feel free to have a look: http://cjv.officeisp.net/biztalk/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx Thanks to Nick W for helping out, he did a great job and thanks again for all of you that attended our session. You choose to be there, and I appreciate your time.

Teched Australia 2006 Recap – Building Enterprise Class BTS solutions

by community-syndication | Aug 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I thought I’d take some time to capture some of my thoughts for each of the sessions I was lucky enough to be involved in this year.

The first session we ran was one called Building Enterprise Class BizTalk Server Solutions. When we did the original planning for this session, we thought it would be important to try to get across to the audience many of the thoughts and ideas of what you need to consider when you build BizTalk solutions. I tried to take the approach of presenting top down – i.e. getting some insight into thoughts and experiences around architecture, SDLC, development/design, performance and other general considerations that go into the dialog we have with customers around building these solutions.

I thought, hey what a great opportunity to get some of the most switched on and experienced BTS people in the field to present this so we got Bill Chesnut, Mick Badran, Graham Elliot, Dave Lemphers and myself to present. Collectively, there was over 20 years BTS experience between us. The idea was we would present 5–7 minutes on thoughts (1 topic each) and then we would open the floor for 1/2 hour so that the audience could as plenty of questions.

We had about 200 people in this session, and 24 of you posted final evaluations. Thanks for doing that. I certainly got some very interesting feedback that I can use to shape future presentations. Like most of these types of sessions, I got some overwhelming positive feedback but some negative feedback as well. Essentially many of you (that posted evaluations) felt that the 5 presenter approach didn’t quite work. You felt it lacked some focus. You felt that it was too little time for each person to present. Many felt that the 10 minute introduction at the start of the sessions (introducing the presenters and the broad usage scenarios) was time that could have been used better… that’s OK, I’ll address that for next time.

On the postive side, most of you felt that the presenters knowledge was great, but still wanted more time and detail in certain presentation areas. Some of you felt the presentation was very informative and useful, and wished other sessions had been similar to this (i.e. informal and open). Essentially the feedback scores ended up being for this session:

Overall Results

So evaluation feedback aside, here is my personal feedback: I thoroughly enjoyed the session! If you attended and did not leave feedback, please feel free to here on my blog 🙂 To be honest, I was somewhat shocked to see that most of the audience had been doing BizTalk / done BizTalk but many of you had not come across Host / Host Instances and Host Resource Utilisation. One of the main things we tried to impart was the importance of understanding the BTS architecture! The other was BAM. Hardly anyone is taking advantage of BAM! It will be the best 4 hours of development time you will spend, and the business will thank you for it. Anyway, one of the things I promised is I would leave some documents for you. So I’ve just created a site with anon access and I’ll load the whitepapers and presentation to the site by close of business Monday 29th August. Check it all out here: http://cjv.officeisp.net/biztalk/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Please feel free to email any of us if you have any queries!

Thanks to Bill, Mick, Graham and Dave for helping out with this sessions, and for all of you that took your *personal* valuable time to attend our session. I do really appreciate your feedback, and will make sure that its used to improve not only next years sessions, but every BTS session we do.

BTS2006 Documentor – finally released for public

by community-syndication | Aug 26, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This is the handy work of Paul Somers – well done Paul!!

Great tool – documents, displays orchestrations and gives the output choice of word/html
or chm.

I prefer CHM as they are searchable etc. within them.

Here’s Paul’s download details

<!–

–>

Inner exception: Multi-part message has body part ’BodySegments’, expected body part ’MSHSegment’.

by community-syndication | Aug 26, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I am not sure how many times I have come across this error. I finally had a few moments to actually troubleshoot this error.
The reason for this message is that the orchestration is expecting as the first message part being the MSH segment, whereas it actually finds the BodySegments component. The orchestration then attempts to […]

The Future of the BizTalk Mapper

by community-syndication | Aug 26, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Just came across a
post from Channel 9 from back in October of 2005 which should be of interest to
all BizTalk developers.  It is a conversaton with members of the BizTalk Mapper
development team about prototype improvements to the mapper which they had. 
The conversation runs on a bit, with introductions of lots of folks and such, so if
you want to jump to the meat of the subject jump to time index 9:40 and watch the
magic.

Unfortunately it does not appear that this has made the cut for BizTalk
Server 2006 R2, which means we’ll have to wait for the 2008 drop to get these
toys. *sigh*

BizTalk Add-in for Reflector

by community-syndication | Aug 25, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

By now every developer out there should be using Reflector.  Reflector is written by Lutz Roeder and its a utility that leverages reflection to disassemble a particular assembly and show you what the inside looks like.  I’ve come up with several great ideas for solutions after looking at how something was designed in the .NET Framework.  Now while this program is awesome it never really worked well in the BizTalk world for things like pipelines, maps, schemas, etc. so Gilles Zunino from MS has put together this add-on for Reflector.  Get it here.  I’ve used this tool for the past two weeks and I love it.  I’m a firm believer that unless you REALLY understand the technology your working on, you really cannot help others understand it as well.  This tool is great for seeing how your orchestrations and artifacts look like as compiled .NET code.  Happy disassembling.

SonicMQ adapter for BizTalk Server 2006

by community-syndication | Aug 25, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’m pleasured to announce our new member of the AdapterWorx family: SonicMQ adapter for BizTalk Server 2006. This adapter will complement MQSeries and TIBCO Rendezvous as the JMS-based technologies adapters.

SonicMQ adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 enables you to use SonicMQ messaging functionalities within BizTalk Server. SonicMQ is an efficient, secure, and scalable messaging system for business-to-business, networked, and internal integrated applications.

This adapter is composed for the SonicMQ Transmit and Receive adapters providing the following functionalities:

Transmit

• Send messages to SonicMQ Queues.
• Point to point and publish-subscribe messaging
• TCP and HTTP transport protocols.
• Multi Broker and Fault Tolerance connections
• AutoAcknowledge connections
• Transacted sessions
• Per message encryption
• Different authentication mechanisms like username-password or SSO.

Receive

• Periodically receive messages to SonicMQ Queues.
• Point to point and publish-subscribe messaging
• Durable Subscriptions
• TCP and HTTP transport protocols.
• Message filtering through message-selectror expressions.
• Multi Broker and Fault Tolerance connections
• AutoAcknowledge connections
• Different authentication mechanisms like username-password or SSO.

Until now the experience that we have had with customers on or TAP program has been great. A trial version is available on AdapterWorx. The formal release is scheduled for the next weeks.

For question regarding the adapter feel free to contact myself or our Director of Sales Gerard Demmer.