Today was the first day of the long awaited BizTalk Summit in London. BizTalk360 has put together an amazing set of presenters and has arranged an amazing venue.
As Tord Glad Nordahl recently quoted: “We will never get this many technical community leaders in one room and on stage ever again”.
200 attendees from 19 countries, 100+ companies, 12 Microsoft Integration MVP’s and 4 Microsoft product group members all in one single room, this might be one of the biggest integration focused events ever conducted in Europe.
In the coming days I will try to give an overview of all the session and point out the key takeaways from all the sessions. In addition to that when the slides and videos of the specific session are available online I will update this post to point you to the complete content of the sessions.
Ready? Let’s kickoff…
BizTalk @ Microsoft and upcoming Server Releases (Guru Venkataraman)
‘On prem is real and here to stay’, that where the words Guru used to kick off his talk at the BizTalk Summit. Guru talked about key trends in integration these days and what the current focus of Microsoft is.
BizTalk Server 2013 R2 will be released in H2 2014 and can be seen as a ‘compatibility release’, actually all the R2 released will be more about compatibility and not about major new features.
BizTalk Server 2013 R2 will ship with JSON support (Guru gave us a demo of the new JSON schema wizard), SFTP, authentication improvements for service bus and upgrades for the Healthcare Accelerator.
Another thing to remember is the release cadence for BizTalk Server, a major BizTalk release will come every 2 years, minor releases will come every alternate years.
After his talk Guru gave the stage to Harish Kumar to talk more about the latest news in Windows Azure BizTalk Services.
(The video of this session can be found here)
Windows Azure BizTalk Services – Latest Updates (Harish Kumar Agarwal)
In this session by Harish Kumar we received a closer look into all the features updates that went into the February update of Windows Azure BizTalk Services.
After breaking the world record of showing over 4 slides in one minute he quickly dived into demo’ing the all new EDI features of Windows Azure BizTalk Services. The goal of the new EDI features is to make EDI more simpler.
Also added in the February release was more integration support for service bus (pull from service bus) and operation log support.
On the roadmap for the quarterly updates for Windows Azure BizTalk Services are following features: ADD integration, pull from LOB adapters, JSON support, BPMN, Adapter extensibility, AS2 enhancements and custom EDI codes….
(The video of this session can be found here)
How to move to BizTalk Services (Jon Fancey)
This great session of Jon took us to the world of Windows Azure BizTalk Services, talking about the challenges and opportunities in moving from BizTalk Server to WABS.
The advantages of moving to the cloud are very simple: lesser cost, lesser manageability, more flexibility and more scalable. One of the most important challenges is that both WABS and on-premise BizTalk Server are very different, but offer the same capabilities.
Jon gave some nice demos on how to migrate mappings, pipelines, parties and agreements.
He has also been working on a community tool, that will be released later this year, that migrates orchestrations to workflows and if you ever saw the raw XML of an orchestration you know this tool is pretty amazing.
(The video of this session can be found here)
BizTalk Server Operations and Monitoring using BizTalk360 (Saravana Kumar)
In this session Saravana talked about the challenges of monitoring and supporting a BizTalk or multiple BizTalk environments.
Last year BizTalk360 released a new version and Saravana took us through most of the important features and options.
Saravana did a good job of guiding us through and demo’ing the entire BizTalk 360 product.
(The video of this session can be found here)
When to use What: A look at choosing Integration Technology (Richard Seroter)
When the Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform (http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Architecture-Patterns-Microsoft-Platform/dp/184968054X) book was released 3 years ago there where about 10 integration tools for you to choose from.
Now, with the growing cloud offering there are more than 14 tools available out there.
This great talk of Richard was about giving us on overview of what choices we have to make as a BizTalk developer or Architect, choosing the right integration tool for the right scenario was the key take away of this session.
Richard created a simple (but yet very impressive) decision framework for down-selecting the choices. All these choices and framework was based on requirements, strategy, design, operations and important questions you should ask to your customer…
According to Richard the future is a hybrid solution, a combination of Service Bus with BizTalk and Workflow maybe could be the next best thing when designing an integration strategy for your application.
Be sure to check out this session when the video comes online because Richard will blow your brains out!
(The video of this session can be found here)
What if you mess up the configuration (Tord Glad Nordahl)
The standard was set, after Richard it was Tord’s turn to take the stage to talk about what happens if you mess up your BizTalk configuration.
In this very interactive session Tord gave us some very neat tips and tricks to fix things when you as a developer (or admin) messed it up.
As a BizTalk admin Tord has done lots of healthchecks and learned many things from the field. We received a ton of best practices, lessons learned and tips on all important topics of BizTalk Server.
Don’t forget to check the video when it comes online!
(The video of this session can be found here)
BizTalk 2013 in Windows Azure IaaS (Stephen Thomas)
In the last session of the day Stephen gave us an overview on the Windows Azure VM’s and how to configure it through the portal.
Quickly moving to explaining everything we ever wanted to know about BizTalk 2013 IaaS.
How to setup a single and multi server configuration in the cloud with powershell and XML configuration files? Stephen talked and demo’ed all about that topic.
Good to know is that all of the scripts Stephen used will be made available for the community, be sure to keep an eye on http://www.biztalkgurus.com/
(The video of this session can be found here)
Cheers and see you tomorrow,
Glenn Colpaert
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