BizTalk Summit 2014 - London

This week i attended the BizTalk Summit in London. The people of BizTalk360 did a great job to put everything together.
Almost 200 attendees from 19 different countries, 100+ companies all in one room. Probably the biggest integration focused event in Europe (World?).

I will try to give you an overview of all the sessions. I will not go to much in detail but you will get all the necessary information.
After a couple days the people of BizTalk360 will release all the PowerPoint’s and videos!

Day 1

BizTalk @ Microsoft and upcoming Server Release (Guru Venkataraman)

Guru talked about the trends in the integration world and what the focus will be for the Microsoft products.
There will be a new release for BizTalk Server 2013 in H2 2014, this will be BizTalk Server 2013 R2.

The main changes in this release will be JSON (JSON Schema Wizard) support, SFTP, authentication improvements for the service bus and some updates for the Healthcare Accelerator.

Windows Azure BizTalk Services – Latest Updates (Haris Kumar Agarwal)

In this session we had a closer look on the February update of the Windows Azure BizTalk Services.

• EDIFACT Protocol Support and X12 Schema Updates
• Pulling Messages from Service Bus Queues and Topics
• Service Bus Shared Access Signatures (SAS) support with Service Bus Queues and Topics
• BizTalk Adapter Services no longer needs SQL on Premise
• Backup and Restore Support
• Operation Log Support

How to move to BizTalk Services (Jon Fancey)

This session gave us a look how we can move from an on premise BizTalk solution to WABS.
The advantages of moving to the cloud and his BizTalk Services:

• Lower Cost
• Lower manageability
• More flexible
• More scalable

Jon gave us some demos about migrating mappings, pipelines, …….
He also created a tool to migrate an orchestration to workflow!

BizTalk Server Operations and Monitoring using BizTalk360 (Saravana Kumar)

This session Saravana talked about the operations and monitoring of your environment with BizTalk360. They released also a new version of BizTalk360 and he took us through the most important features and options!

I hope also to work more with BizTalk360 then i now do…

When To Use What: A Look at Choosing Integration Technology (Richard Seroter)

Richard gave a session where he talked how we can choose the right technology for the right project.

Richard create his own “Decision Framework” with a set of criteria like Requirements, strategy, design, … )
With that in his mind he started half way with a buy, hold or sell part.

What if you mess up the configuration? (Tor Glad Nordahl)

This session is definitely a session you need to see on video! It have something of a stand-up comedian.
Tor itself is a Administrator and he needed to push his talk to the limit for the developers in the room.

He talked about SQL Server Jobs, …
He also told to the crowd that everyone can be a developer. He called them “drag-and-drop” developers!

BizTalk 2013 in Windows Azure IaaS (Stephen W Thomas)

The last session on the first day was for Stephen. He showed us an insane power shell script to setup a single or multiserver environment. He will share the scripts on BizTalkGurus

Day 2

Exposing Operational data to Mobile devices using Windows Azure (Kent Weare)

This was the first session on the second day. Kent gave us a presentation about the mobile services. I am not a mobile developer so for me it was something new but it was very interesting because Kent gave us an demo with an application that uses the Mobile Services and WABS where he also used the push notifications.

Manageability of Windows Azure BizTalk Services (Steef-Jan Wiggers)

The second session of the day came from Steef-Jan. Dressed in suit and tie. Steef-Jan gave us a talk about manageability of WABS.
Where can you find all the necessary information? How can you leverage this information. WABS is of course still at the beginning of it’s live. So hopefully it will be more easy in a couple of weeks/months/years…..

Real Word Business Activity Monitoring (Dan Rosanova)

This was one of the session i didn’t know what to think about before. BAM is not the most popular product in the BizTalk world. I never used BAM before. How many people is using BAM? Feel free to give any comments.

BizTalk is for the most people the system to blame when there is something wrong. Most of the times it’s not BizTalk itself that give a problem. But one of the external applications we use to integrate.
In that way BAM is one of the “systems” that can be used.

Add the end of the session he also showed us some great tools (Powermap,….) instead of the old SharePoint site.

You can find some more information on the Blog Of Dan!

Examining Master Data integration using BizTalk Server and SQL Server Master Data Services (Johan Hedberg)

The next session was a session about SQL Server master Data Services (MDS). MDS looks like the BAM portal a little bit old. It’s also a SharePoint side. Johan had also problems to view the site very well because of the low resolution. Of course the website was not responsive so many scrolling was necessary. It also looks that Microsoft is not updating MDS. The last years there was no update of the product. What brings the future?

Johan also demoed how to use the data from SQL Server on a secure way in Excel.

Thinking like an Integration Person (Nino Crudele)

This was the most, how should i say,crazy presentation. He created some power tools (“NoS tools”) for Visual Studio 2012 in the past 4 months. The result is amazing.
Some of the main feature of the tool are

• Register / Unregister a dll from the GAC
• Jackhammering artifacts
• Checking dependencies
• Reflection
• Test Pipelines and Pipeline Components

Just check often his Blog to download the tool for Visual Studio 2012

BizTalk Mapping Patterns and an Introduction to WABS maps (Sandro Pereira)

It’s not easy to talk after Nino, but Sandro did it very well.
He talked about some mapping patterns. One of the most important parts in our integration work with BizTalk. Sandro is also working on some great e-book about all the mapping patterns he spoke about on the BizTalk Summit. Just be sure to read the e-book when it’s released!

Workflow manager: Running durable workflows in the cloud and on prem (Sam Vanhoutte)

The last session came from Sam. It’s maybe not the best slot of the event. But Sam did a great job. Sam talked about the history of Workflow. What the improvements are for .NET 4.5 , …

Sam also demoed some cloud-based workflow solution. Where he was using some integration with WABS, Azure Service Bus …



I hope you enjoyed reading the previous stuff? It’s probably the same stuff as on many other blogs. But i just went to give my own view on the BizTalk Summit!