A friend of mine Dan, gave a great recount of his very first experience with BizTalk
when I came in and built a prototype in a couple of days (no pressure or anything
– not that the business decision makers were watching over my shoulder at every move).
Later I realised that Dan’s company was doing the ‘Pepsi’ challenge on me, by giving
Microsoft and the others a set of 25 tasks to do within the integration space.
No pre-canned demos, real live sink or swim stuff. Two days later I came out of the
‘Tribal Council’ with immunity and they had a great path forward. I then went on to
help them with their actual implementations.
Dan recounts a little of this encounter here – http://techtalkblogs.com/blog/archive/2007/10/10/3221.aspx