This week (thursday May 10th) I’ll be speaking at the UK Connected System user group, if you live close to London you should definitely join us there, here are the schedule: Signup: http://ukcsugmay2012-eorg.eventbrite.com/ Start Time: 6:30pm (doors open from 6pm) End Time: 9:30pm Location: Customer Meeting Room 05 Microsoft Cardinal Place London Signup: http://ukcsugmay2012-eorg.eventbrite.com/ Session
Blog Post by: Tord Glad Nordahl
In UK we got a policy of shifting the bank holidays that comes in the middle of the week to following Monday, so people can have an extended weekend. Last year’s 1st May bank holiday was shifted to 2nd May, on that day we released our very first version of BizTalk360 CTP to public. Today is 7th May, alternative to 2012’s 1st May holiday.
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We introduced BizTalk360 with a very powerful tag line "Worlds first BizTalk production support and monitoring tool". We clearly understood, being first doesn’t mean anything (Google is not the first search engine, iPOD is not the first MP3 player and Windows is not the first GUI OS to give few examples). It’s all about innovation and constant improvement that either makes or breaks the product.
In the following chart we summarize our improvement over the last 1 year. We release 4 major versions in the past 1 year. We simply didn’t increase the version number for every simple updates, each version came with substantial functionality that ease the life of BizTalk administrators and support people in a day to day activity.
| v1.0 | v2.1 | v2.5 | v3.2 | v4.0 BETA | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | May-11 | Aug-11 | Oct-11 | Feb-12 | May-12 |
| Features | |||||
| 1 | Web based console | ||||
| 2 | Application management | ||||
| 3 | Advanced Authorization | ||||
| 4 | Governance/Auditing | ||||
| 5 | Topology | ||||
| 6 | BAM Portal | ||||
| 7 | Query Instances | ||||
| 8 | Advanced Event Viewer | ||||
| 9 | Dashboards | ||||
| 10 | Platform Settings | ||||
| 11 | SQL Instance view | ||||
| 12 | Monitoring/Notification | ||||
| 13 | Clustered Host Instances Handling | ||||
| 14 | Knowledgebase | ||||
| 15 | Role based Security | ||||
| 16 | Message Box Viewer Integration | ||||
| 17 | Monitoring/Notification Improvements | ||||
| 18 | Graphical Message Flow | ||||
| 19 | Throttling Analyser | ||||
| 20 | SMS Alerting | ||||
| 21 | Tracking Manager | ||||
| 22 | Advanced Event View Improvements | ||||
| 23 | Custom SQL Queries | ||||
| 24 | Monitoring plugin architecture | ||||
| 25 | Monitoring Enhancements |
In the past 1 year we got customers over 10 countries, covering various industry sectors. Most of the customers are large scale enterprise customers, some of them are well known retail brands. Never thought the shirts I wear and the world famous trainers I use for my tennis (companies) will become my customers one day!!.
I whole heartedly thank every one who helped us to achieve this milestone. All my MVP and community friends, my close family and friends. We haven’t paused yet, we already started planning for what’s coming after 4.0 (keep tuned).
NOTE: BizTalk360 got it’s own blog now, so if you want to keep up to date with product improvements, please subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360
Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Filtering the informative, insightful and quirky from the fire hose of cloud-based hype.
Mike Pearl from PWC Looks At Cloud Strategy Through The Lens Of Value in a guest post for Forbes, Michelle Boisvert discusses the Real and perceived security threats of cloud computing, abd Greenpeace is still mad about ’dirty cloudy computing’.
CTV News shares its opinions on Which cloud storage solution is best for your data?, whilst V3 discusses the security and performance issues that may slow the adoption of cloud storage. Addressing the security issues, the Washington Post looks at ways to keep the cloud secure.
On the Azure front, there is a nice story about how MediaValet are Thriving on Microsoft’s Cloud Platform, and Mary-Jo writes about How Twilio went from handshake to Microsoft Azure partner in a month-plus.
“The order in which we perform the links between the elements from source to destination has a huge impact in the final result”. This statement is true and false at the same time! In fact the order with which we associate links (Drag & Drop) from the source to different destination elements is irrelevant, since […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
If you’re like me (lazy), chances are that you’ve tried to take shortcuts when refactoring BizTalk projects and run into the same trouble that I have. What I’ve found is that if you open a BizTalk orchestrationfile in the Visual Studio XML viewer and made any changes to it (typical changes I would make here […]
Blog Post by: Johann
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Don’t automatically shove your config in BTSNTSVC.exe.config because its easy? |
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I wrote a blog post a few years ago around the options for where you could put configuration settings in BizTalk (Click here). As I mention in the blog post its very common that people just fill the BizTalk config file with lots of settings because its the easiest option. I often work on big projects where you have many BizTalk projects running at the same time with different delivery deadlines. One of the problems is that the BizTalk configuration file is one of the few resources that is shared across your applications no matter what. When you have settings that are in the BizTalk config file then your BizTalk application now has additional dependancies so if you want to produce a new version of the file you have to be careful to consider how changes to the file may affect other BizTalk applications. |
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Im not saying its bad to use the BizTalk config file, far from it. What I do think is a good idea though is to have a development process and governance around changes to the BizTalk configuration file to ensure a quick and easy change doesnt bite you in the future. If you want to put something in the file for custom application configuration make sure you talk it through with your technical lead or others on the team to ensure everyone agrees that the BizTalk configuration file is the right place to put it. Also have some guidelines and standards for your team to determine what types of configuration should go where.
Lately, I’ve been playing around a lot with the Windows Azure Service Bus EAI components (currently in CTP). During my upcoming Australia trip (register now!) I’m going to be walking through a series of use cases for this technology. There are plenty of cool things about this software, and one of them is that you […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
Yesterday we announced the immediate availability of BizTalk360 V4.0, you can download it and start using it straight away from here http://www.biztalk360.com/Content/beta
Now BizTalk360 got it’s own blog, please subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360 to get regular updates on our progress.
One of the major improvements we have made for BizTalk360 v4.0 is extending our monitoring capabilities.
In previous version, customers were able to monitor all the artifacts related to BizTalk Applications (send ports, receive locations, orchestrations, and host instances status) + they can set alerts based on Message box viewer report (when critical or non-critical errors above certain level). But with BizTalk360 v4.0, customers can monitor and get alerted in various areas as listed below
1. BizTalk Applications (simple)
2. BizTalk Applications (Advanced)
3. BizTalk Servers
4. SQL Instances
5. BizTalk Environment
6. Message Box Viewer
We have written a detailed blog post with lots of pictures showing various functionalities in detail in our new official BizTalk360 blog
http://blog.biztalk360.com/post/2012/05/04/BizTalk360-v40-Beta-Extended-Monitoring-Capabilities.aspx
Now BizTalk360 got it’s own blog (http://blog.biztalk360.com/), please subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360 to get regular updates on our progress.
Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
On day 2, the Summit contained breakout sessions that allowed us to dig into some of the topics that were introduced on the first day. More specifically we were able to dive into topics such as Windows 8 and the Consumerization of IT, Dynamics AX 2012 and CRM “R8”.
Consumerization of IT
With worker demographics changing, employees are now placing new demands on organizations to use more modern technology or let them use their own. For many recent College graduates, they don’t remember a time when there wasn’t an internet. For many employees, they have more computing power and modern equipment at home than they have in the office. These situations are creating headaches for Infrastructure managers, IT Directors and CIOs.
Windows 8 provides some tools that address some of the needs of this emerging demographic.
Windows 8 for the Enterprise
Dynamics 2012 AX
Prior to this event, I have not had a lot of exposure to Dynamics AX. What became extremely evident is that Microsoft is very aggressive and committed to the ERP segment. They are also not only interested in establishing a platform but are also interested in providing industry specific solutions.
Proactive Applications
Microsoft’s Approach
What is Dynamics 2012?
Cloud on your terms
Other
CRM – What’s coming down the pipeline?
Big trends in CRM
CRM “R8”
CRM Growth
So this concludes the 2012 Canadian Leadership Summit. Overall, there was some good sessions. I really enjoyed seeing what is coming down the pipeline in areas of Windows 8, Dynamics AX and CRM.
In two of my previous posts I introduced and explained how to debug BizTalk components in Visual Studio: BizTalk – How to debug Custom Pipeline Components running on Isolated Host and Debugging External assembly’s or pipeline components – Attach to Process – which BizTalk process to use?. In the last one, I presented two ways […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira