Gijsbert’s BizTalk Notes

I’ll be presenting the following session at SharePoint Connections in the Hague, 28 & 29 Sept:

MSOL06: Fully Leverage the Microsoft Application Platform with SharePoint 2010

By using SharePoint 2010 as the universal user interface in your Service Oriented Architecture and using features such as human workflow, business intelligence and the integration services provided by the Microsoft Application Platform (BizTalk server and SQL server), companies improve the performance and reliability of their business processes. 

Check out the list of sessions here: http://www.devconnections.com/shows/NED2010FALL/default.asp?c=1&s=157

See you there?!

Cheers, Gijs

Using a canonical data model (CDM) has many, many advantages (see http://www.indafield.com/BizTalkNotes/2008/02/04/canonical-data-model-a-must-have/). There is one thing that actually creates an extra challenge and that is supportability. To be more precise, when error messages are generated by the ESB complaining about problems in transactions with regard to element values not being correct, it is quite hard for a support person to find out what the actual problem is and where it originates from. For example, when an outbound order is generated from the SAP system, the ESB picks this up as an IDOC, translates it into intermediate (CDM) and finally translates CDM to the destination format. For example EDI.

Now when during serialization to EDI, the ESB finds out that a certain field contains a wrong value, it is quite hard to relate that to the origination data (in SAP). And even if that is possible, the IDOC fields still don’t prove very useful (too technical).

The easiest way to solve this issue is to make sure your CDM contains business speak. And that’s a good idea anyway as discussed in the post referred to above. This way, the error message can display the EDI error and the business level information from the CDM. This will greatly help support to communicate the error to the right folks and help fix the error situation.

I’m very proud to have been awarded Microsoft BizTalk Server MVP for the 5th consecutive time!

I’ll be presenting “ESB and Microsoft BI” on March 4th (audience is IT Managers) at the Application Platform event in Noordwijkerhout, NL (see http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/apo/default.aspx). My collegue Steef-Jan Wiggers will present “Monitoring the Business Integration Suite” on the 2nd day, targeted at architects and developers (March 5th).  My collegues Tomasso Groenendijk en Wesley Bakker will present “ESB for SharePoint” at the 2nd day as well.

This will be the most important Microsoft Application Platform event this year in the Netherlands, so make sure you’ll be there!