This post was originally published here

At BizTalk360, we provide some essential services which benefit the customers and our partners immensely. Businesses trust and use our expertise to assist them on a wide range of projects relating to their BizTalk needs. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Setting up our monitoring product BizTalk360 and integrating their BizTalk servers.
  • Advising on the best practices used in the community for monitoring.
  • Helping in BizTalk migration projects via support and licensing discounts.
  • In-Depth training and advice on end to end BizTalk solutions.

There are 3 types of services we offer, namely:

  1. Product Demos
  2. Best Practice and Installation service
  3. In-Depth Training for BizTalk360

Product Demos

Demos can turn prospects into customers. They combat client concerns and provide proof what the product can do for you (our customers). Customers often want to see it in action before they commit to a purchase. We also offer a Free Trial as well.

Free Trial of BizTalk360
It gives the customer the best opportunity to experience what it would be like to own the product

Most of the times, we are approached by the customers themselves who googled and came across our product BizTalk360 and want to know more about it.

Sometimes we are approached by consultants who say “We love your product and need your help to convince Management to get it for our company”.

We also give Demos to our Partners as well to keep them well-equipped and confident in the product.

BizTalk360 Demo – Request one today!

We avoid giving generic demos. We try to learn about our audience’s specific challenges and what they want to achieve and tailor the demo accordingly. We want customers to feel empowered and be confident of the product they are going to be purchasing. The customer should be happy that BizTalk360 is going to be a good fit for their requirements.
We have also printed some documentation which outlines all the main features of BizTalk360 – What’s the business value of using Biztalk360, which we will be giving out at our upcoming INTEGRATE 2017 event.

Best Practice installation and configuration

Customers like hearing about best practices, especially if they’re easy to implement and will result in an immediate benefit. We provide this service to help set up BizTalk360 at the customer site. While the actual setup can be quite simple and quick to setup, depending on your environment you might face some issues. We provide a 2-hour service (chargeable) where we set up the product (via a web call) and go through a few basic setup tasks

  • SMTP settings – These are the first thing to setup to ensure that the notifications for any alarm are successfully sent.
  • User access policy – Add user specific permissions to view different parts of the product.
  • Setting up Alarms/Monitoring Dashboard – Monitoring artifacts is the core of our product. We explain the types of alarms available, which are more suited to certain scenarios. The dashboard helps you to see all the status of artifacts mapped in 1 look.
  • Monitoring of SQL Servers
  • Event Log setup – This will enable you to view Windows logs across multiple BizTalk servers
  • Purging Policy – This will help set up purging to avoid bloating of the database.

Often a simple task can also turn out to be complex when dealing with multiple environments. A lot of our customers also take this opportunity for their BizTalk administrators to get a quick crash course in the product to see how they can utilize the product in the best way possible.

Some important troubleshooting steps during installation

  • Try to run the MSI using logs, so if any issues occur they are detailed in the logs.
  • Once the installation is complete successfully, if the home page is not displayed and you see any errors like Icons/images missing – Check the ‘Static content’ tickbox is activated under ‘IIS’ in Server Manager -> Add Roles & Features
  • If you are Installing BizTalk360 on a complete standalone server and there is no trace of the remote BizTalk environment we are going to configure. Simply enter the corresponding values for BizTalkMgmtSqlInstanceName and BizTalkMgmtDb columns as shown below.
  • If it doesn’t help, kindly run the troubleshooter tool on the machine where BizTalk360 is installed. Troubleshooter will help you to find any permissions missed.

We are soon releasing a ‘User Guide’ of around 400 pages for the basic setup tasks required when you install BizTalk360 – written by Eva De Jong and Lex Hegt. Please look out for it at our ‘INTEGRATE 2017’ event.

BizTalk360 Training

BizTalk360 has a lot of features which can be quite overwhelming for someone new. Many companies appreciate an in-depth intensive BizTalk360 training. This is an 8-hour training that we provide and is given by our BizTalk Server & BizTalk360 Product experts.

This session is covered over 4 days in 2-hour slots (or as desired by customer). The main idea is for customers to get a better understanding of how the product can help them achieve certain scenarios. Our experts interact with the audience and understand the environment and architecture and what customizations they want to achieve.

Initially, they go through the various features available in BizTalk360, then on subsequent days the trainer does a deep dive and goes through more technical complicated scenarios and how the customer can benefit from the product. Many customers use this as a training session for their technical staff. This is conducted via a remote webinar session (GoToMeeting) and is a very interactive and a good learning experience for most customers. The session is not a straightforward monologue but it provides plenty of space for the customer to pose questions regarding their own circumstances.

Exciting upcoming Services/Training

We also have a new training for ‘BizTalk Server Administrators’ run by our very own BizTalk expert Lex Hegt.

The audience would be Systems Administrators who deploy and manage (multi-server) BizTalk Server environments, SQL Server DBA’s who are responsible for maintaining the BizTalk Server databases or BizTalk Developers who need to support a BizTalk environment.

During this course, attendees will get a thorough training for everything they need to know to properly administer BizTalk Server.

Some of the course topics are:

  1. Installing and configuring BizTalk Groups
  2. Operating and monitoring BizTalk Server
  3. Deployment of BizTalk applications
  4. Periodical administrative tasks and best practices.

Keep tuned to our website for more such information or contact [email protected] to arrange the same.