My good friend Lars Wilhelmsen asked me a couple of ways ago if I knew of a way to automate creating Queues on a clustered instance of MSMQ. Normally, a cluster of machines using Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) with MSMQ in Windows Server 2008 and up will have several MSMQ instances installed. For example, a […]
Blog Post by: Tomas Restrepo
I’m in the process of becoming a great speaker (an untouchable beauty of this world is that we do not pay taxes for our dreams, yet ), however in my short experience one of the greatest difficulties that I encountered is trying to explain: “What is BizTalk?” in a short way, ie that doesn’t take […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
This is my last post about this book. I’ve had the pleasure of giving this book to three of my readers and I’d promised weeks ago to Packet Publishing that I would publish a short review of the book, however, this is my honest opinion and I’m not paid to do this review. First of […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
The TechNet Wiki is a library of information about Microsoft technologies written by the community for the community. Through TechNet Wiki you will find the following BizTalk Server 2010 articles:
Hopefully you find one of more article that are useful for you to learn about capabilities of BizTalk or new ways to integrate with BizTalk.
Cheers!
The TechNet Wiki is a library of information about Microsoft technologies written by the community for the community. Through TechNet Wiki you will find the following BizTalk Server 2010 articles:
Hopefully you find one of more article that are useful for you to learn about capabilities of BizTalk or new ways to integrate with BizTalk.
Cheers!
I was planning to write this email for a very long time, a brief post about my personal experience building BizTalk360 from concept to product.
We been doing lots of talks so far around London and various cities in Europe (London ,Sweden, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden Again). For the first time we are crossing the Atlantic, to Boston for the Business of Software conference. This time it’s not for presenting BizTalk360 and doing product promotion but to understand the business side of things running BizTalk360 efficiently.
Last 20 months or so is an incredible journey for us. Coming from a pure technical background, there is a steep learning curve on making a concept into a marketable product. The technical part of the equation is only 25-30%, even in that 10% of so will be not be so fun part and not relevant to the actual business problem you are trying to solve. Examples: Working on Licensing, Obfuscation, Payment processing, Installer, Source control, branching, build process, code signing certificate, Web site etc.
As a business owner you are always occupied with one thing or the other. You’ll soon get accustomed to sleeping whenever there is a little time, doing different things based on your body condition (ex: do some trivial things at end of the long day like tuning the website) etc. I personally would like to thank my wife and children (4 years and 2 years) for their incredible support. I don’t think I’m matured enough to advise people, but based on my experience so far one piece of advice I can give is "Time is king, once you lose it you won’t get it back", and its never too late. The best time to start something is "NOW"
There is a famous saying "Ideas are worth nothing, it’s the action that makes the difference", that action part is not so easy. If you got something in your mind, action it. If I think back, the version of BizTalk360 I showed to Yossi and Michael just before Christmas 2010 and to the MVP community in Feb 2011 was a completely different product. The key is keep improving the product day by day. Our other key objective is "One step forward each day"
Another important thing I have learned is invest your time in reading some of the great books. I’m not a great reader until I started BizTalk360 the only books I have read was technical books. In fact I had this notion of wasting time if I read a novel or something that’s not relevant to my technical stuff. But starting BizTalk360 changed the whole thing. These are some of the books I have read, motivational, business related, time management, getting things done, etc
The above books are not the complete list, I was reading at an incredible phase of 2-3 books a month. You may be wondering where I got the time, it goes back to my point of "Time is King", I bought audio books wherever possible and used all my driving hours, and I also build up the habit of picking 1 or 2 books during my flight and complete it. There are other numerous blogs, podcasts, videos I haven gone through during my journey.
You really don’t need to go and invent new things all the time, it’s all about repetition, I picked up lot of those small practical things I can apply to my day to day activity which enhanced my productivity from the books. Another important thing while reading such books is, make note of actionable items. Otherwise you just read the book feel energetic and completely forget about it after a week or so.
The peak of this journey is Business of Software conference here in Boston. I debated quite a bit whether to attend the conference, because it’s not cheap both financially and time wise. I did my research, gone through few past videos, blog post and the general positive feedback I’ve seen from the past attendees.
There are still so much to learn and a long journey ahead, what better way to learn than the people who has already done it. I hope BOS will give us some of the skills we desperately need to run BizTalk360 successfully. For us there is no turning back now, we can only see forward. We are very positive, we’ll make BizTalk360 successful.
Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Firstly I would like to get the score thing out of the way and in true consulting fashion I’ll say: It depends. I give it two or four stars depending on your needs as a developer/architect. Let me explain:
The whole basis for the book is not to be a comprehensive guide of every system you will ever integrate with, but rather the more common ones. Systems like SAP, Dynamics AX or SharePoint. Neither is it a documentation update on the BizTalk adapters or even about more general features of BizTalk. Before spending some money on this book you should ask yourself; what do I want to do?
Are you a senior BizTalk developer or perhaps an integration architect and need to integrate with one of the systems covered in the book, then you should not only buy the book and read it, but rather you have to (4 stars). On the other hand, if not, then you can leave it on the shelf, or what the equivalent version in the online book store is; this is the 2 stars.
Do you need to integrate with any of these? Great! Good luck! This book is a very good place to start.
The chapters on SAP (which I guess are written by Kent Weare) are some of the best technical writing I’ve ever come across, but then again I might be biased. I was once in the situation described in the chapter and I like how the writer must have overcome a lot of boundaries (both mental and structural) to be able to write about it in the way he does. The way he focuses on “how to integrate with SAP-people” so to speak, and what terms to use to better make yourself understood is very useful and something I would have loved to have about three years ago.
A book that refers to blog posts is new to me and not something I dislike. However, in some cases, the use of those links seemed more like a fast and easy way to get the chapter done, rather than trying to incorporate the information from the blog post in the text.
Some chapters (particularly the one on Windows Azure) might have benefited from more information about some key aspects of the integration. The section about ACS comes to mind.
There are a lot of how-tos and walkthroughs showing you exactly how to configure adapters, complete with many illustrative screen dumps. You should have absolutely no problem building your first integration for Dynamics CRM. Then again I think that in some cases I would have benefitted more from just information about the adapter and the integrating system.
Blog Post by: Mikael Sand
QuickLearn is offering a copy of Thomas Erl’s SOA Design Patterns for any one who registers for the BizTalk Expert Series: ESB 2.1training course on November 7th.
In this 3-day class you will learn to install and use the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.1 to create a flexible, secure, and reusable infrastructure for services, and to build composite applications, using existing services, to create new end-to-end business processes. Register Online.
If you have any questions, please contact us. We look forward to seeing you in class!
We are currently evaluating BizTalk 360 at one of my clients at the moment and I plan to write a more detailed post in the future about our experiences but in the meantime I wanted to make a comment about something this week which was particularly useful.
We have a very large project with many teams and vendors and in our first integration test environment all of the delivery teams do daily deployments to this test environment. From here a successfully tested release could be promoted to other environments as required.
Its quite painful at times due to the pace of change in this first test environment and im sure most readers would be familiar with the typical challenges around integration and biztalk being the bit that identifies the problems and often not be the cause of the problem. Yes you know what I am talking about. A significant amount of my teams time is taken up with troubleshooting issues and working out retrospectively where a problem came from.
In our evaluations of BizTalk 360 one of the things I have done is to setup the BizTalk 360 health check emails to be published 4 times per day. This week we had a situation where the test teams had signed off a release but had not realised for some reason there was an issue where some messages were unable to be loaded into an application. This whole release had been signed off to go into the UAT environment and then an hour later the BizTalk 360 email came out and we could see these suspended messages. We were able to identify and rectify this issue in the application which was not accepting messages and plug the gap in the test scripts before the release went to UAT.
Finding this issue in the system test environment and resolving it would have saved a significant impact with the problems this issue could have caused in the UAT environment in terms of lost test time etc etc. In my opinion this one situation probably paid for the cost of the BizTalk 360 license on its own for our large scale project so hopefully our evaluation will be finished soon and we will be able to roll this out across other environments.
Thanks Saravana keep up the good work