Thursday, October 06, 2005
I don't know why but today didn't look as interesting as yesterday... well any way I have discovered few cool things around BizTalk 2006 that will be loved by everyone who develops with.
The day stars with some philosophy, a presentation about workflow concepts, Roger Sessions (note the surname, it could be a joke? :-) explain us the main lines about what workflow is and how we need meet the principal business requirements in an agile way to reach the success developing applications for business. Roger starts showing the mayor requirements for the enterprise to improve the benefits: agility in the processes, alignment between IT staff and business staff and compliance with the actual law (i.e.: to avoid forbidden actions with the accounting). After that, we have reviewed the different workflows that actually occurs in the enterprise processes to finally explore witch are the requirements that any "workflow platform" must carry out to allow the implementation of the business processes matching the business process requirements. These are the basics of any workflow platform:
- Web Services native support: this provides agility to develop applications thats relies in SOA.
- Xml Enabled Database: it make sense that if we use web services intensively, and the WS interchanges XML messages, if we have a store with XML support then we are managing the interchanged messages with agility.
- Workflow framework: to support design and develop any kind of enterprise workflow, allowing process to interact process, people and services between them. Having this as an SO extension (framework) there are less things thats relies on the IT staff to manage. What we request to this framework is agility: quickly development, updatable processes, evolutionary; alignment: the same view for IT staff and for business staff ; compliance: auditable, robust and secure...
- WS Orchestration engine: to provide agility to make the web services collaborate and with features as scalability and support to communicate with legacy systems.
- Tools: to help everybody to use the platform.
This platform make possible develop solutions which improve the business process successfully and, therefore, make more money to the companies (after all, we are talking about business).
Then, I had the opportunity to see the mayor improvements in BizTalk 2006 orchestration and messaging. Features like support to manage binary messages, multipart messages creation ad-hoc, the new flat file schema wizard (great!), adapters enhancements, runtime pipeline configuration and recoverable interchange messages processing.
One of the coolest things is the "Application Concept" that allow present all related artifacts (ports, orchestrations, pipelines...) as a unit. You can start / stop an application from the management console and all underlying artifacts are checked and requested to starts or stops.
Well, it's enough for me today... tomorrow more!