BIA meeting – 7 February

February 9, 2007   10:54

Last Wednesday the BIA group came together again. We welcomed a new member, David, to our team. David worked for years with Usoft and now he is joining our team because at his project they start a BizTalk trial in which he participates. Main goal of his work will be to migrate from a BizTalk 2002 environment to the new BizTalk 2006 Server.

We discussed the possibility to become Microsoft ESB partner as we have an opportunity to use the ESB Guidance kit in a customer’s project. As a group we believe in the possibilities that the ESB Guidance package offers and we hope that we can join the 0.8 “beta” program.

One of the things that will be possible with the ESB Guidance is to implement UDDI inside the orchestrations to mange resources. We had an interesting discussion about the possibilities that this would offer. We think that it will be useful to do some sort of Load Balancing or Version management. If you have suggestions about the usage of UDDI inside a BizTalk orchestration feel free to share it with us in a comment.

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Partner Academy BizTalk Class: Week one

February 4, 2007   18:02

I just submitted my answers on the mini-test questions for this week to our instructors. To receive our class certificate at the end of the course we have to submit the answers of a few questions covering the learned content.

The first week was quite a heavy one for me as developer. It was full of new and useful stuff. In my opinion the number of study material was a bit to heavy. Every weekday exists of some required reading materials and a lot of extra optional readings. On a normal day of work it is almost impossible to read and view both. A lot of the extra`s are waiting on my USB stick to be viewed on a later time.

This first week we didn`t really dive into the features of BizTalk 2006, but we learned about the position that BizTalk takes in the complete product set of Microsoft and its position between the competitors. Focused on BizTalk I did not really know the other competitors in the Business Process Improvement landscape. The course informed me about the other players like IBM, Oracle, SAP and SeeBeyond and why and when BizTalk could be the better solution.

Also widely covered are the strengths of all the solutions the Microsoft Server System offers and the technologies like MSMQ, SQL Service Broker, SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Replication and HIS 2004.

This week was a heavy, but really useful one. From next week on we are focusing on BizTalk which will be more common to me. Perhaps that will give me more time to look into the extra study materials.

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