Monitoring BizTalk Solutions – The Tools Part 5

Monitoring BizTalk Solutions – The Tools Part 5

by | May 24, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

It has been a while ago I did a series of posts on monitoring tools for BizTalk solutions. Back then I discussed the following tools:

  • BizMon now named Integration Platform Monitor (IPM);
  • Minotaur currently it’s second release;
  • Frends Helium.

And now there is a new tool made by Saravana Kumar, who I met last MVP summit in person, called BizTalk360. During bus ride from summit back to hotel he demoed me this monitoring tool and I was impressed by functionality and look and feel. Finally there is way for administrators to have a tool similar to administration console, but now web based. The other tools also have a web interface and I still cannot understand why Microsoft hasn’t thought of bringing administration console also in web version (like SCOM 2007 R2!). BizTalk360 is feature rich and I suggest to look at it.

I am impressed by work Saravana has put into it and provided the tool with such a nice UI. User experience in my view is an important factor for a tool to be adopted.I definitely recommend developers and administrators to have a look at this tool and see if it fit for purpose in their environments.It can be download easily from the site after registering. Installation and configuration is easy and straight forward.

image

Above you have a screenshot of BizTalk360 in my VM, a single box installation of BizTalk Server 2010. In near future I hope a do a new comparison between current offerings for monitoring BizTalk solutions.

BizUnit 4.0 Released

by | May 23, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

All,

If in case you haven’t noticed Kevin Smith has released BizUnit 4.0 yesterday. Look like Kevin was hard at work during the weekend. It’s a stable release after an alpha and beta phase.

Go get it at http://bizunit.codeplex.com/releases/view/66850

BizUnit 4.0 introduced some fundamental changes around writing coded tests and XML tests. XML tests are now based on XAML.

Nandri!

Saravana

Creating Complex Records in Dynamics CRM 2011 from BizTalk Server 2010

Creating Complex Records in Dynamics CRM 2011 from BizTalk Server 2010

by | May 20, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

A little while back I did a blog post that showed how to query and create Dynamics CRM 2011 records from BizTalk Server.  This post will demonstrate how to handle more complex scenarios including creating fields that use option sets (list of values) or entity references (fields that point to another record). To start with, […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter

BizTalk 360 – Restricting user to specific BizTalk applications.

by | May 19, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

One of the strengths of BizTalk 360 is its fine grained authorization module. It allows administrators to set fine grained authorization policy to users.

The below screen shots shows the various areas you can either grant or deny access to the user profiles. As soon as the user login, he can check his authorization level right on the home dashboard.

In this article, we will take a look at how a super user can restrict an user to access only selected applications in the environment. In our test environment there are 5 BizTalk applications deployed as shown in the below picture, in addition to the default BizTalk.System and BizTalk Application 1.

The task we are going to show here is, Mike Watson is one of the application support person and he only need access to LoanProcessorApplication and MortgageProcessorApplication. To accomplish this task,  a super user (administrator) will access BizTalk 360, and click on the "setting" link at the top right hand corner, which will bring the settings home screen as shown below.

Depending on whether its he is going to modify the existing user or assigning a new user, he will select one of the options under "User Access Policy". For this demo, we are going to select "Add New" which will bring the below screen.

The administrator can then enter the name of the domain and the user name (which is Mike Watson in our case) and select the applications (example LoanProcessorApplication and MortgageProcessorApplication) from the list and save the settings.

Now, when Mike Watson access BizTalk 360, on the home screen he can check his rights. As shown in the below picture, he is restricted to access only LoanProcessorApplication and MortgageProcessorApplication. And he also got very restricted access in the environment, he is not granted permission to access other parts of the system like BAM, Topology, Advanced Event Viewer etc.

His object navigator is going to look as shown below. As you can see one two applications are listed for his access and other parts of the system are not visible.

Summary:

Fine grained authorization brings lot of advantages for the enterprise. The foremost reason is, security, the users can only view and operate (if granted) on applications (and suspended instances) they got access to. Also on the other hand it makes life easy for application support people, they are hidden away from unnecessary things, which are not related to their task.

Social:
twitter: @biztalk360
facebook: http://facebook.com/biztalk360
support: http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360

Note: If in case you haven’t noticed BizTalk 360 is a web based (RIA) application, built using Microsoft SilverLight. The above screens are accessible via browser. There is no necessity to install anything on the client PC except Microsoft SilverLight.

Nandri!

Saravana

BizTalk Mapper – resolving decimal sum and separator issues, Keyed Cumulative Sum continued

by | May 18, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

As a continuation of my Keyed Cumulative Sum post, where I did a key based summation using an xslt call template in a BizTalk map I got two main points of feedback worth repeating and showing.

Questions

  1. If I use Sum on a decimal number it gives me all sort of weird decimals in the Sum although it shouldn’t; ie a sum of 1.1 and 1.1 could result in 2.199999999999. How do I solve that?
  2. What if I am in Sweden (or Germany or some other country) and I want to use a comma (,) as a decimal separator instead of a period (.). How can I do that?

Answers

  1. You can use the xslt format-number function to remove erroneous decimal digits that are the result of using Sum on a decimal number.
  2. You can use the xpath translate function to replace a period with a comma. However this does not conform to an xsd:decimal, so make sure that the target schema does not have this field defined as a decimal if you wish to be compliant.

This will make the outlook of the xslt instead look like this (code is edited to improve readability):

<xsl:template name="OutputSum">
  <xsl:param name="param1" />
  <xsl:param name="param2" />
  <xsl:element name="Compensation_Amount">
    <xsl:variable name="SumOfNodes" select="//row[Compensation_SubCode=$param1 and   
                                            Compensation_Level=$param2]/Compensation_Amount)"/>
    <xsl:variable name="FormattedSum" select="format-number($SumOfNodes,'0.00')"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="translate($FormattedSum, '.', ',')" />
  </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

The use of several variables are for maintainability only, and are not required. You could jam it all into the value-of select statement if you really want to.

/Johan

Blog Post by: Johan Hedberg

Demos from the How to do integration with Office365 and On-Premise Applications at TechEd (MID372-INT)

by | May 18, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Thanks to everyone attending my session on integration with
Office365 and on-prem applications.

All demos can be downloaded from here: http://blogical.se/files/folders/downloads/entry25152.aspx

I recommended you to start downloading the AppFabric SDK CTP,
in which you’ll find the ClientAccessPolicyPublisher sample I was running in
the last sample:   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d89640fc-c552-446e-aead-b1e0d940f31b

Good luck and let me know if you need any
additional help.
Blog Post by: wmmihaa