This is the second story in the BizTalk Community Series bringing active BizTalk community members to the foreground. I have received a lot of positive feedback from the first post on Tord Gald Nordahl. The series will continue with the second person from the BizTalk community I like to introduce: Rohit Sharma. He has recently been awarded MVP for BizTalk Server, and is an valuable contributor to BizTalk forums and active blogger.

Rohit is 28 years old and lives in Chandigarh, also known as “The City Beautiful”, located in the northern part of India. He works in Mohali as a Senior Software Developer at Ionnor Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which is part of EDB ErgoGroup, Norway.

Rohit loves to design and develop BizTalk solutions, and he likes the challenge of tuning the BizTalk environment for performance optimizations. His journey with BizTalk started early 2007 and working with BizTalk since then gave him the opportunities to explore different tools and technologies during various integrations projects. When he started exploring technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Server AppFabric his BizTalk background came in handy.

Rohit loves to spend time with his family and friends, and going through different articles and blog posts on various technologies. He enjoys providing responses to technical issues on the BizTalk forums. Besides contributing to the forums he likes to blog about BizTalk related topics and issues. He likes to play and watch cricket as he is a huge fan of the Indian Cricket Team.

Rohit likes to share the following with the community:

“The difference between a successful person and others is not lack of knowledge, but rather the lack of willingness to share it. Steef-Jan Wiggers is a knowledgeable expert and he has the will to share his knowledge with others through his blogs, speaking engagements and other channels.”

Rohit thinks sharing is the secret to his success.

I would like to thank Rohit for his time and his highly valuable contributions on the BizTalk forums and his blog.

Cheers.

The Open Group got together with the SABSA Institute to give a new security architecture flavor to TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework. It takes the form of some new guidance for working the security angle into enterprise architecture planning. A key to the SABSA approach is willingness to accept some risk while working to ensure security. That’s informed by the notion that security strategies for businesses must admit that a business is here to do business.

 

“The most secure store never opens,” quips SABSA Academy leader John Sherwood.

 

The TOGAF-SABSA collection of best practices will find a ready audience as IT moves to endorse more and more Web APIs. And it is not always about security. When Sony’s game playing audience saw their sites down due to security issues they complained – not to get the sites secure, but to get the sites running. Can you say paradigm shift?

Gamesters are different than enterprise apps users. The enterprise app users sue. The balancing act is delicate. Read about the TOGAF/SABSA Guidance.

 

 

As of January 1st 2012 I have left the Oracle Ace Program.

I will always be proud of having been part of such an impressive group, and I will surely miss being an Ace Director! Let me try to explain this apparent contradiction.

First of all, I have never been a very technically oriented guy. Nevertheless, I was very lucky to be involved in doing the first BPEL implementation in The Netherlands, back in 2005. That opened up a lot of doors (mainly because we had a lot of issues to fix and needed a lot of support ). Having a succesful implementation and a drive to spread the vision of service orientation led to an invitation to the Ace Program by Clemens Utschig, with massive support from Jürgen Kress (thank you both!). Being a part of the Ace Community has been very rewarding for me. I have met so many good people in the program, have had very interesting discussions, certainly learned a lot, but above all: got many new friends.

Over the last 2 years I have felt more and more guilty of not living up to expectations. The course of my career changed when I started my own company (MShift) in 2009, as an independent architect. Ever since that time I have been active doing Enterprise & Business Architecture. My involvement with technology declined even further. It meant I was no longer staying abreast of all the new developments around SOA Suite etc, not doing any presentations for the community, nor participating in the forums. I was participating more on OTN ArchBeat (thanks Bob!). All in all, it feels like I am no longer adding to the community.

There’s another factor involved, though. I could have stayed Ace just for the fun of it, and for being able to travel to San Francisco every year to meet my fellow Ace Directors. That in itself was tempting, but … being an independent architect becomes harder when you are affiliated in any way with a vendor. In my case, being an Oracle Ace Director often raises eyebrows on my independency and integrity. People who know me will know that has never been (and never will be) an issue. Regardless, it is more and more often that I find it to be working against me. Commercially it is better for me to become a real independent architect.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, and when we were asked to reevaluate our own position I decided to do what I felt was right: to leave the program. So there it is, in a nutshell. I have become an Ace Alumnus.

Some last words: I would like to use the opportunity to thank Oracle, the Ace Program (especially Vikki Lira and Lillian Buziak) for all their good care, friendliness, input, support, knowledge and a lot of fun. I have no doubt the Ace Program will keep on being succesful and I will try to keep in touch as much as I can.

Last couple of weeks I written a number of wiki articles for TechNet Wiki. The TechNet Wiki is a place, where content is generated by the community and Microsoft employees about Microsoft technologies and products for the community. I very much like the concept and in November 2011 I completed my first ten articles. I continued to work on some articles and now below you will find a list of my next ten completed wiki articles on BizTalk and one on Windows Azure Service Bus EDI/EAI:

• First are a couple of articles on the adapters available through BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010:
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 – WCF SAP Adapter
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 – WCF OracleDb Adapter
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 – WCF SQL Adapter
• BizTalk Server 2010 Adapter Pack – SQL Azure
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 – WCF Oracle E-Business Adapter
• BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 – WCF based Siebel Adapter
• Next an article on unit testing for BizTalk Server
• An article on BizTalk High Availability
• Overview of all the MSDN BizTalk Code Gallery Samples
• A survival guide for BizTalk Business Rules Engine
• Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs – Introduction article I wrote just after CTP was released. I updated it later with some more resource links to blogs.

I hope you will find these articles useful. Feel free to edit any of them (correct, add, enhance). The complete list of BizTalk wiki articles can be found here. I myself will be working on next couple of articles in the near future, which will contain some in depth ones.

Cheers!

Most of you are familiar with the interview series by Richard Seroter. Based on this concept I want to start with a series of blog posts, in which I would like to introduce active BizTalk community members. Contrary to the interview series the focus here will be solely on BizTalk Server. It will bring several active BizTalk community members to the foreground.

The first person from the BizTalk community I like to introduce is Tord Glad Nordahl, an active community personality with a strong BizTalk administrative background. He has been active on forums and TechNet Wiki for the last couple of months. I had a chat with him on his background, what kept him busy in real-life, what sports he enjoys practicing and/or watching and what he would like to say to the BizTalk community.

Tord is 25 years old, has a beautiful wife Alfa, and has a lovely daughter Maribell who is nearly two years old. In June they are expecting their second child. The family lives in the rainy city of Bergen in Norway. He works as a BizTalk Administrator Expert for Bouvet ASA, and is stationed in Stavanger working for Statoil 4 days a week.

He likes to call himself a BizTalk advisor, or as he states a BizTalk Administrator Expert. He doesn’t like developing BizTalk solutions but instead focuses more on the environment itself. In his day to day job he is busy with performance optimizations, health checks, monitoring and reviewing applications and solutions. This to ensure that all the processes run according to Microsoft‘s best practices. His job is to make sure that the customer will get all the benefits of BizTalk as an integration platform.

In his spare time he likes to spend as much time as possible with his family. Besides that, he roams around blogs, writes blog posts and TechNet Wiki articles, and contributes to the BizTalk forums and to the local and international BizTalk community in any way he can. He likes to do research on BizTalk using his infrastructure at home. He has four servers running a BizTalk 2010 environment (2 BizTalk clusters and 2 SQL servers clustered) enabling him to experiment with different scenario’s. He then shares his findings on his blog. Besides being a respected BizTalk professional, he also happens to be very handy, doing all kinds of work around the house, much to his wife’s liking. Jobs like building brick walls, removing doors or do some flooring, are no problem. Tord loves soccer and supports his home team “Brann“. Unfortunately, he himself can no longer practice soccer due to a knee injury. Therefore he switched to cycling these days.

Tord would like to thank people for reading his blog posts, and he is grateful for the opportunity to learn more about BizTalk through the community and research. He recommends all of you to go into the TechNet Wiki and to contribute and participate in the Forums. Being active in the community and contributing to the community will make it grow bigger and better. And as he likes to state: “Be proud of who you are, and don’t be afraid to speak your mind”.

And in Norwegian he finished of our chat with a “Tusen takk Steef-Jan” (Thank you) for all your contributions to the community and for taking time to chat with me. It’s been a pleasure.

I like to thank Tord for his time and am looking forward to meeting him during the BizTalk innovation event at my company 1st of February.

@adrianrcampbell wants to explain #entarch to IT architects who don’t see the wood for the trees (via @itworks). Adrian reckons that the primary Purpose of Enterprise Architecture is to support strategic change.

@nickmalik says that IT Archs still won’t get it. “Need examples of individual activities that make a difference.” So let’s hope Adrian provides some useful examples in his subsequent posts.

In the meantime, I’m concerned that the phrase “supporting strategic change” lacks bite. What is support really worth? Let me look at a parallel case – sports coaching.

Let’s say that the purpose of a sports coach is to support one or more athletes and help them win competitions. For example, Scottish tennis star Andy Murray has recently appointed another former tennis star Ivan Lendl as his coach. This follows Murray’s lack of success at the highest level – his repeated failure to win a Grand Slam tournament. Perhaps Lendl’s presence on Team Murray will make some unspecifiable difference to Murray’s performance; but even if Murray’s performance now improves, nobody can ever be sure how much difference is due to Lendl. Murray has survived without a coach for extended periods, and might possibly have won sooner or later anyway, so we have to regard the coach as an optional extra. There is a sense that the appointment of a coach is an admission of some inadequacy on Murray’s part. (John Seddon would call this “failure demand”.)

At this level considerable sums of money will change hands, and it is not clear how this is negotiated. What is a fair reward for the “support” of the coach? Does the coach get a flat fee or a percentage of winnings?

I don’t think there are many enterprise architects who work on a no-win-no-fee basis. But there are certainly many executives who believe they can manage so-called strategic change perfectly well thank you, without having enterprise architects sitting in the player’s box tutting and fretting. It’s not just IT architects who don’t appreciate enterprise architecture.

I am organizing an event at Ordina on BizTalk Innovation with the topic “Monitoring and Administration”. This is the first event of a series of events under name “Ordina BizTalk Innovation” that will take place at my company Ordina. This and future events are open for customers, the community and Ordina professionals. The event on the 1st of February three speakers will do their presentations on BizTalk Monitoring and administration. During the event I will be the host.

Wouter Crooy, Senior BizTalk Consultant, will have a session on:

Custom Monitoring solutions for BizTalk, ESB Toolkit & WCF

Wouter will during his talk provide a number of custom solutions for monitoring a BizTalk solution and the ESB Toolkit . Using the standard tooling of BizTalk will get you a long way, still with some of the custom monitoring solutions you can have more insight in your own custom BizTalk solutions.

Saravana Kumar, BizTalk MVP, CEO of BizTalk360 will talk on:

Manage your BizTalk Server environment efficiently using BizTalk360

BizTalk 360 is a web based (Silverlight RIA) application primarily designed for supporting and monitoring Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. It addresses some of the common challenges organizations face on running the day to day operations of a BizTalk environment. Some of the key capabilities of BizTalk360 includes:

• Fine grained authorization
• Governance/Audit
• Proactive Monitoring/Notification capabilities
• Graphical Message Flow Viewer for Tracking data
• Various dashboards (Environment, Application, BizTalk Server, SQL Server, Host etc)
• Advanced Event Viewer
• Integrated BAM Portal
• Dynamic topology diagram
• Message Box Viewer (MBV) integration
• Knowledge base repository

There are various other features in addition to the above, that makes BizTalk 360 a must have application for any Microsoft BizTalk Server environments.

Lex Hegt, BizTalk Architect, will have a session on:

Lex will talk on BizTalk monitoring in general and provide an overview on existing tooling in context with BizTalk administration. He will also demonstrate the BizTalk Processing Monitor. This is a tool that, among other things, does (near) real-time monitoring of message flows through BizTalk systems enabling the administrator to quickly identifying issues.

You can register for the event here. The talks of Lex and Wouter will be in Dutch and Saravana’s talk in English. Also joining us during this event will be Tord Grad Nordahl BizTalk expert on BizTalk administration from Bouvet ASA (Norway).

Cheers.

A lot more software architects are working these days to get their arms around the concepts of events and event processing.  Many people have reams of transaction data they are beginning to think about correlating and tracking. Sometimes the differences between event processing and other types of processing seem simple – but that simplicity can be deceptive.

This comes to mind after a recent conversation with Hub Vandervoort, CTO of SOA Infrastructure Products for Progress Software. He contended that one of the major elements that goes into handling events is a dedicated event processor. That puts it outside the realm of general purpose computing familiar to the broad ranks of developers.

“You have a window of time in which events take place,” he said. Thus there arises a use for a dedicated processor that can handle things quickly – as they happen. “You can’t use a thread-based model as is found with general-purpose application servers,” he continued.

For Progress’s part, an Apama Correlator based on a HyperTree  architecture is specialized for executing event pattern matching logic to take care of  a high volume of event data.

Time-oriented language semantics are supported too, this being another differentiator from popular general-purpose approaches.  Sounds complex, yet, Progress Apama has forged model-based development methods that allow business power users to help program the event engines.

What do you think? Ready to try CEP? What alternatives are you considering? Let us know.

#entarch @leodesousa asked if one had to teach a 1 wk mod on EA, what would be the approach?
@leodesousa asked if it was necessary to say what #entarch was before describing the value+process

I am not convinced it is necessary, and I started a discussion on Linked-In Does it matter what enterprise architecture is?

@nickmalik suggested tellimg story of a company without EA doing planning. Show class complex / silo happens. Do Root Cause Analysis … then walk them through EA data collection, EA taxonomy, and models. ask class to make decisions again w/ data

Nick’s solution to Leo’s requirement assumes the goal is to appreciate the difference between EA and its absence. Yes, as foundation, says @nickmalik Build understanding as first step to empower collaboration between biz and #entarch

@leodesousa confirms that his objective is for the students to know there is an approach called #entarch that can help manage chg … I would want them to know enough to ask for #entarch services to help the business – partnership … which is a good way to explain the capabilities and value that can be derived from a planned approach

@aleksb6 is trying to cope with the idea that value of a planned approach needs to be explained … can’t we just tell people to go read The Art of War before they start learning #entarch ? … imo #theartofwar is a pre-req for any strategy/planning function, not just #entarch

---

My idea of a learning objective is that the students learn to do something, not that they are persuaded of (the value of) something. What is more important for the students to be able to do at the end of the week – talk about architecture or solve real business problems? And if the students manage to solve some meaningful problems using the tools of enterprise architecture, this is surely more likely to convince them of the value of EA than any amount of theory and rhetoric?

How does reading The Art of War contribute to such learning objectives? Clearly there is a value in shared stories, and being able to refer to certain patterns of activity. @greblhad has been posting an EA version of the Art of War by instalments. Maybe when he’s finished he can do an EA version of the Aenead: “De Architectura Virumque Cano”.

(I don’t know any Latin by the way; I just plugged the title of one work into the first line of another. Doesn’t that always work?)

In this post I would like to summarize how my year 2011 went. For one it has been a very busy year. I have been writing a BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook that due March this year. It took me more than nine months to write. I have had great support from Randal van Splunteren, Richard Seroter, Saravana Kumar, Tord Gard Nordahl, Mikael Hakansson, Sandro Perreira, Rene Brauwers and Abdul Rafay. They have supported me by reviewing it, contributions and valuable advice.

That is not all I have been doing more than just writing a book. I have written 47 blog posts on this blog and some on the BizTalk Ordina blog, a lot of wiki articles, code gallery samples, articles for magazines, book reviewing, and public speaking.

I enjoyed my interview with Richard Seroter during the MVP Summit and the interview about me by Ed Price. I loved the opportunity to speak at Ordina, BizTalk User Group Netherlands and Sweden:

• Masterclass BizTalk and AppFabric
• BTUG: BizTalk integration with SalesForce
• BizTalk RFID and StreamInsight Talk
• BizTalk User Group Sweden : My debut as International Speaker
• BizTalk User Group Meeting 30 November 2011

During 2011 I had also my debut a technical reviewer for BizTalk book. I reviewed the recently re-awarded BizTalk MVP Dan Rosanova’s book: BizTalk Patterns:

• BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns by Dan Rosanova
• BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns Book: Win an eCopy

In 2011 I did some research regarding BizTalk and wrote a couple of posts on my findings:

• WCF-SQL Adapter Stored Procedure
• WCF-SQL Adapter Stored Procedure : SQL Azure
• Table Operation on Oracle 11g XE with OracleDbBinding
• Polling Oracle 11g XE with OracleDbBinding
• SQLExecute Oracle 11g XE using WCF OracleDbBinding
• Calling Stored Procedure Oracle 11g Using WCF-Custom OracleDbBinding
• Polling SQL Azure Database Table with WCF-SQL Adapter
• Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI December 2011 CTP – EAI Oracle

Well and that is not all as I have been active in BizTalk forums and became moderator in February, went to my first MVP summit, got re-awarded in July, and had a great time during Windows Build. All in all it has been a fruitful year and as for 2012, hopefully you’ll see more blog posts, more wiki articles, and more presentations.