Gijs’ BizTalk Notes

Ik heb een paper geschreven over SharePoint als Business Portal met scenario’s & business cases voor de CIO.

Conclusie van de paper:
Aan de hand van vier scenarios en bijbehorende business cases heeft deze paper getracht u als CIO van uw organisatie te overtuigen van het nut van de (bredere) inzet van Microsoft SharePoint als een business portal. Hierdoor wordt meer uit uw bestaande IT systemen en applicaties gehaald en kan er ook beter en sneller op veranderende marktomstandigheden ingesprongen worden. Daarnaast geeft het uw medewerkers, klanten en leveranciers betere middelen om hun dagelijkse interactie met uw bedrijfsprocessen aangenamer en tegelijkertijd efficiënter te maken. Door deze bredere implementatie van SharePoint in uw omgeving op een standaard manier aan te pakken en uit te gaan van bewezen best practices, kan op een gestructureerde wijze de juiste applicatie architectuur worden neergezet om bovenstaande mogelijk te maken.

Download hem hier.

Groet, Gijs

Back in 2004, the BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed book was the reference guide for anyone starting to work with BizTalk Server.

Today, a completely new book has been released. Written from scratch, but with the same goal: a developer reference for BizTalk Server 2010 users.

It’s called “BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed” and has been written by my fellow (current and past) MVP’s Brian Loesgen, Jan Eliasen, Charles Young, Scott Colestock, Jon Flanders and Anush Kumar.

I personally had the honour to be the technical editor and therefore have read the book about 20 times already :-).

A must read! Check it out here.

Cheers, Gijs

With Microsoft’s push to the cloud people are publicly wondering about the amount of R&D investments being made in “traditional” on-premiss server software. Microsoft is making a big bet on cloud computing and they *will* succeed. Looking at BizTalk Server specifically, and Microsoft integration middleware in general I can tell you this:

In the past couple of years, Microsoft faced three major hurdles in the adoption of BizTalk Server:

1. Low latency challenges. This prohibited BizTalk being used in people facing applications.

2. .Net developers

3. The “two workflow engines” story

The first is commonly known. Until BizTalk 2010 you had to go into the Management Database to tweak some settings in order to accomplish lower latency scenarios. It still meant a minimum of 50ms for every persistence point, but for most scenarios it was okay. This could however not be combined with high throughput scenarios. Until BizTalk 2010, where these tuning settings can now be performed at the host and host instance level providing for combinations of low latency and high throughput solutions. But still…. every message goes at least once to the MessagBox database…

The second is probably less commonly known, but it is a fact that the “.Net developer” is the greatest BizTalk Server competitor. Why buy this stuff if you can build it yourself?

The third is also more and more known; why do we have two separate technologies and engines for handling human (WF) and system workflows (XLANG).

Together with the push to the cloud, this has resulted in some smart people at Microsoft coming up with a new architecture to make all of the above possible and satisfy everyone: one integration middleware architecture that enables development, deployment and management of integration solutions with one set of tools and which can be deployed in the Cloud and on-premises (Server or Appliance).

Watch for some cool stuff being released in the coming period. Some of it already has been released, such as this week’s CTP release of composite apps in Azure.

It will probably take them a couple of years until this all proves to work out well, but I’m confident they’ll manage. And for us integration specialists it will become better and better, because integration won’t go away and the architecture and tools will help us architect, design and build better integration solutions and at the same time bring new possibilities thanks to the cloud. This will be a real paradigm shift!

Cheers! Gijs

My company motion10 has been elected #1 Great Place to Work in the category Small and Young Enterprised. So proud!