Culminis Speakers Bureau

Recently I joined the Culminis Speakers Bureau.

Quotation:
“The Culminis Speakers Bureau, a service available exclusively to Culminis Member Organizations, and
provides top IT presenters including Microsoft speakers. Only presenters with top credentials are allowed in the Culminis Speakers Bureau, and after a speaker is utilized, Member Organizations are allowed to rate the speakers online, as well as view prior speaker ratings.”

Please check the August Newsletter to get more information about Culminis.

The Challenge of SOAD

A major challenge establishing service orient architectures (SOA) and applications is how to design the right services in order to make them reusable and sustainable. A lot of questions have to be answered. For instance:

What are the service candidates?
What is the right service granularity?
Is it better to use a top-down or bottom-up approach?
etc, etc, …

Apart from technical issues answering these kind of questions is very important for the quality of the resulting applications. Albeit the traditional OOAD approaches are helpful, SOA requires a different perspective on the subject. This perspective is party technical an partly business related as existing business processes have to be taken into account.

The article Elements of Service-Oriented Analysis and Design provides a good introduction into the subject.

Experience shows that it is a good approach to have mixed teams with experienced people from the technical and the business departments.
SOAD is neither a merely technical nor a merely business related task. It’s both. That’s the challenge.

Biztalk 2006 at a Glance

I’m currently working at Microsoft TechEd in Amsterdam. My focus is on Business Process Management and Biztalk technology. At the conference I have the opportunity to see and try most of the new Biztalk Server 2006 features. From what I’ve seen so far the next release will not introduce any major changes, but will bring a lot of improvements. Below I’ve listed some information concerning these new features.

1. Zoom
A feature that was really missing is simple zoom functionality in the visual designers of Biztalk, e.g. the orchestration designer. With Biztalk 2006 it’s possible to zoom every model in the designer. That allows to visualize large business processes inside of visual studio.

2. Backwards compatibility
Biztalk Server 2006 is backwards compatible with the 2004 version. That means binding files and other artifacts can be used without or little modification.

2. Admin console
The admin console has been greatly improved. It’s a MMC snap-in and now more like a central point of administration which allows to get status and health information very easily.

3. Deployment
All Biztalk artifacts (bindings, rules, assemblies) can be bundled to applications. These applications can be deployed in it’s entirety. They can be exported as msi files. Such a file can be imported later on a different machine an started with a simple click.

4. BAM Portal
The new BAM portal allows to get access to key performance indicators via web frontend. This tool is really useful for analysts. One can create alerts which send e.g. emails if a particular threshold was reached. In conjunction with the admin console it allows to monitor applications on business- and technical levels as well. The input data for BAM can now also be created by Visio.

5. Routing of failed messages
Extended filter expressions allow to subscribe to failed messages and to process them accordingly. This gives much better control over runtime related problems.

My Favourite TechEd Sessions

This year I am attending TechEd Amsterdam again.
Most of the time I’ll be working in the Ask The Expert and Hands On Labs areas as a subject-matter expert for Biztalk Server.
If you would like to meet me don’t hesitate to come by.

Here is a list of my favourite conference sessions:

– Monitoring and Troubleshooting Biztalk Server 2006 Solutions
– What’s new in Biztalk Server 2006 Runtime
– Implementation of Common Integration Patterns with Biztalk Server
– Biztalk Server Capacity Planning
– Building and Maintaining a Performant and Healthy Biztalk Solution
– Biztalk Server 2006 Business Activity Monitoring
– Deploying and Managing Biztalk Server 2006 Solutions

As you can see this year my focus is on Biztalk Server technology.
I hope that I will have enough time to attend as much sessions as possible to get fist hand information especially concerning the upcoming Biztalk Server 2006 release.