[quote user="rseroter"]
Anonymous posts are fun for everyone! It's a shame you've had a rough experience; many of BizTalk Server's 6000+ successful customers would disagree with your assessment.
To my knowledge, Microsoft has never positioned BizTalk's out of the box EDI as a "full" capability. The pitch has always been BizTalk + partner if you want anything but basic EDI functionality. EDI isn't easy to do, regardless of technology applied, so that's why you see questions on the topic. Be honest.
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Actually, EDI is easy to do with proper knowledge and capable products. Be honest.
Even when it was "jumpstart kit", Microsoft asked me to do a pilot, which I agreed to participate in, and then they withdrew because the product "wasn't ready". So even the first stab, they were pushing it as a full featured product, but discovered otherwise by themselves, fortunately before wasting our time. Instead, I implemented another product, which is still running happily at that site 6 years later. No 2002 upgrade, no 2004 upgrade, no 2006 upgrade, no radical changes whatsoever, just low impact incremental releases which were included in the maintenance contract. That's ROI.
Furthermore, I can tell you I have been called into other BizTalk projects that were spinning the bowl because the client was sold something that didn't meet their requirements. The original HIPAA product is a direct example of Microsoft selling BizTalk as fully featured, when it wasn't. I had to do a white paper to get the funding at the 11th hour for Edifecs X-Engine to save that BizTalk project.
But that was probably the fault of a "weak client", right Richard?
[quote user="rseroter"]
Similar case with Business Process Management (BPM) now. BizTalk by itself isn't full BPM (as the market defines it), but, BizTalk PLUS partner solutions can provide our customers with a full complement of functions. Does that mean that if I recommend a third party BPM product (which integrates with BizTalk), and 3 years from now we offer parallel functionality in the BizTalk products that it's a bad investment or deceitful? Not necessarily. It means we're growing the BizTalk function base to do more and more out of the box.
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We were discussing the particular case where Microsoft promoted Covast in the 2006 release in March, and then just 3 months later, changed course. That promoted a potential bad investment, at the very least, and was deceptive to both the 3rd party and the end customer. Be honest.
[quote user="rseroter"]
BizTalk is hardly a product with no shelf life, and if you’re forced to redo projects on each release, then odds are you are a weak architect who hasn’t built solutions that accommodate change. Our customers have known for years that BizTalk releases updated versions every 18 months are so, and moving forward has one of the most exciting roadmaps of any Microsoft product. While the upgrade story from 2000/02 was admittedly rough (do to a wide-ranging framework upgrade), we've worked hard to protect the existing investments folks have made.
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What is evidenced here is that you haven't answered any of the questions. Instead, you lash out and insinuate that I am a weak architect for not predicting where the product was going in the next releases? That's a pathetic response, Richard.
Frankly, 2002 to 2004 was also a bad upgrade. I wrote a replacement for the migrator to allow us to retain our custom functoids from 2002 , but we never did a 2004 production release, because of the issue of deployment and maintenance of all the dependent assemblies for a large scale enterprise. 2006 added nice large file handling capability, and the deployment pieces missing from 2004, but now that were just about to purchase 2006 with Covast, everything has changed, and we are now forced to re-evaluate. Part of the consideration is that we are reimplementing a platform that we just implemented 2 years ago. That is not ROI, and don't blame me for that, Richard.
I am sorry I have offended you. I have been an EDI architect for over 10 years, and I was offering my comments from that perspective. They are not unique.
Also consider that I am a customer of yours, not the other way around. Do you even want my business? How do you think your responses are impacting my product selection in the future? Is this how you treat all of your customers, by casting veiled insults at them for complaining about your poor choices?