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.