“BizTalk Light & Easy” series is back with 9 new webcasts: BizTalk 2010 and Windows Azure – Paul Somers BizTalk and AppFabric Cache Part 1 – Mike Stephenson BizTalk and AppFabric Cache Part 2 – Mike Stephenson Integration to SharePoint 2010 Part 1 – Mick Badran Integration to SharePoint 2010 Part 2 – Mick Badran […]
Photos from Summit
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Oh, Canada!
Microsoft is hearing you, guys.
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all BizTalkiens
and the whole world is here…
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In the recent edition of The BizTalker Newsletter I featured the below article about BizTalk Adapters. Read the article below or join the newsletter to have it delivered directly to your email. I welcome any comments. feedback, or thoughts on this subject.
BizTalk contains many built-in adapters for communication with external systems. When those built-in adapters do not meet the needs of your project, some hard decisions need to be made such as whether to buy an adapter, build an adapter using the framework, or use an adapter from CodePlex (i.e. open source). This article will take a look at the pros and cons of each approach.
Buy an Adapter: While this option would require an outlay of cash up front, it can be advantageous in terms of support and speed of implementation.
Pros:
Support is provided by the adapter vendor which can be rapid and 24×7.
Adapter vendor provides a simple, legal licensing model.
Purchased adapters are usually buy now, install tomorrow so there is no lag time to get up and running.
Cons:
Purchased adapters have an upfront cost to the project.
You may not be able to customize the adapter if it does not meet your needs.
Build an Adapter: While this can seem like the obvious answer for a software or consulting company, usually this is a large undertaking. I talked with the writers of the famous SFTP Adapter on CodePlex. They said it took 300 to 400 hours of effort to build that adapter. Out of this time, it took about 200 hours just to learn the adapter framework and the rest to implement the protocol-specific logic. Even at a conservative rate of $100 per hour, this is between $30,000 and $40,000.
Pros:
There could potentially be additional services revenue for the company and they may maintain Intellectual Property (IP) rights.
You have the complete flexibility to build what you want and how you want it.
Cons:
The company that builds the adapter will have to do the maintenance and support.
The building company may not be a subject matter expert in either the BizTalk Adapters Framework or the implementation protocol.
It could take a significant amount of time to complete, test, and deploy.
Use a CodePlex Adapter: CodePlex is a large open source software community. It hosts many different BizTalk Adapters. Some of the most popular are the SFTP Adapter and the Scheduled Task Adapter. Sometimes 3rd party support is available, but in general support is through community forums.
Pros:
Adapter is provided at no cost.
You have access to the source code to customize as needed.
Cons:
There is no support for things that do not work as expected.
There are gray areas in terms of licensing and the impact of customizations.
When a new release is available, customizations need to be reapplied.
Company legal policies might restrict or prohibit the use of open source code.
In my experience we have both bought an adapter and used CodePlex – both times with the SFTP Adapter. I have never built a custom adapter.
Lets take a deeper look at the decisions that impacted my situations.
Case 1 – Bought /n software SFTP Adapter. This was for a large Fortune 500 client. It was simple; the service contract with the client did not allow the use of any open source software due to license and support concerns. I am unsure of the cost of the SFTP Adapter, but using it was simple and we had no issues.
Case 2 – Used CodePlex SFTP Adapter. This was also for a large Fortune 500 client. While the adapter was free, it took about 40 hours over 3 weeks for legal to review the license and approve the use of the adapter. Also, we ran into a few situations that required customization of the adapter. This resulted in an additional 80 hours of development and testing effort. Total costs to us for the free adapter was at least 120 hours and this consulting firm charges much more than $100 per hour.
In conclusion, it is important to remember the trade-offs with each adapter choice. Remember that free does not always mean free and that even the best custom adapter could end up resulting in months (if not years) of support calls down the road.
Yesterday was a big day for Tellago Studios . After a few months hands down working, we announced the release of the SO-Aware Test Workbench tool which brings sophisticated performance testing and test visualization capabilities to theWCF world. This…(read more)
BizTalk is a great tool but sometimes the output is a little unreadable because of the number of namespaces in a document. This post is related to a previous post where I had to import a zillion schemas . Once I had those schema's imported I could…(read more)
I recently participated with our MCS Canada team on a large BizTalk 2009 and CRM 4.0 integration project. I gained a ton of experience about CRM integration from that project and I thought I’d speak about it at our semi-annual TechReady internal conference. Not long before TechReady though, we release CRM 2011 and I realized that speaking about BizTalk 2009 and CRM 4.0 was about as relevant as speaking about Windows 98 and Trumpet Winsock implementations (I was reading a Slashdot article this week about the Trumpet Winsock creator so that’s where the reference came from). I hastily decided to refocus the presentation on CRM 2011 and BizTalk 2010. That meant that I had to quickly figure out exactly what the integration story was between these two products. After a bunch of trial and error and some helpful conversations with folks from the CRM 2011 team, I figure out the options. It turns out that you have TWO options for integrating BizTalk 2010 and CRM 2011. Yes indeed, you have two different methods to choose from when integrating these two products! I ended up having a fairly relevant and well received presentation to deliver. From that internal session, I’ve repurposed my content into a publicly ready format and created a shorter walk through video that explains the two options that you have. Instead of trying to write a lengthy blog post about how to do that, I’ve just filmed a walkthrough of the process. (I found that these video walkthroughs were highly successful when I did them for the BizTalk ESB, so I thought I’d do them again here for CRM) Also, I’ve included the source code project that I use in the video so that you can get a jumpstart on your process.
All in all, I found the process to be a very simple one once I figure out a few basic concepts. Hopefully, this blog post will help you figure out those concepts more quickly than I did. Once you’ve got a grip on those, then I believe you’ll find this integration process to be a very easy one. As with most of these blog videos that I do, I created this after midnight when the house was quite so if you find some issues or bloopers, let me know and I’ll correct them.
Below is an overview of the components, tools and services at play in to the process. In the video, I’ll walk you through this diagram in more depth before showing you the actual project I built. In this diagram, you can see that there is data flowing from BizTalk out to the CRM 2011 cloud service as well as data flowing from CRM 2011 Online back through the firewall to BizTalk on-premise. In this first video, I focus on the BizTalk to CRM 2011 Online option. In a day or two, I’ll post a second video that shows the CRM 2011 Online event notification being sent back to an BizTalk on-premise installation. (it’s a cool one)
This is quite a long video (>45 minutes) so I had to split it into a multipart zip file in order to get it to fit into my SkyDrive folder.
You can get:
You’ll need to download both parts of the zip file and then use WinZip to extract them.
Cheers and stay connected people
Peter
One of the major limitations of traditional SOA governance platforms is the lack of integration as part of the development process. Tools like HP-Systinet or SOA Software are designed to operate by models on which the architects dictate the governance…(read more)
Firstly thanks for all that attended my 5pm – ’fireside’ session.
I definitely was a first for me having a session so late in the day. I took my shoes
off, wiggled my toes and got into it up on stage.
The session was pretty light and easy to follow along as to get bogged down into the
deep technicalities of data storage within SharePoint was going to put all to sleep.
During the session I spoke about (& demo-ed) each approach from Site/Web Property
bags, Custom Service Apps, Lists/External Lists Pros and Cons of each – all good.
Here’s my slide deck guys – Enjoy.
SLIDE
DECK – PPTX
Prior to the MVP Summit, Johan Hedberg and Mikael H%u00e5kansson stopped by Calgary and participated in a Mini-BizTalk Technical conference for my company and three other sister companies. In addition to their presentations we had a round table discussion to find out how the other companies are using BizTalk and had two other presentations; one by myself and another by a colleague Luciano Barbieri.
Below you will find links to the various sessions. I wish I would have recorded these sessions as the demos were excellent. Maybe next time.