Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2006

 

This post was going to be a daily post about the SOA conference, as it was happening. Unfortunately, I had been on the road for weeks during that period, and then my stay at the conference was cut short for personal reasons. Here are some of my notes, and I will probably blog about some the topics in more depth as time permits.

 

The annual SOA conference at MS has just kicked off. We are expecting some major announcements pertaining the future of the BizTalk platform. I have some ideas about what they will say, but I will hold out for the keynotes to see for sure.

A lot of well known speakers will be here this week, and I look forward to talking about SOA and what advances there are in helping driving business value.

David Chappell is giving the first keynote right now. He defines some fundamental aspects of SOA (which is universally difficult to put a good definition on) as:

- Standardize on SO communication protocol (SOAP is what made this 20 years long overnight success finally catching on)

- WCF and SCA (non-windows) are enhancing this.

- Create the necessary SO infrastructure

- Use BPM technologies effectively

Ultimately, this is all about providing business value. While SOA does this through many ways, the business agility enhancements is one of the best ones. The more easily IT can respond to the changing business needs, the better the business will do.

The first keynote was excellent, and I just added him to my 'Must see speaker regardless of topic' list. Keep in mind there are two David Chapell's that speak on SOA. How funny is that?

THEMES FOR V.NEXT

There was a session with Oliver (top manager for BizTalk Server) about what the next version of BizTalk will look like. He was speaking about the version that comes after BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

- mission critical enterprise

current theme- high scale, reliable, managed and controlled :

vnext->models raise the level of abstraction, distributed exec env, fill key gaps in platform; treat n machines to act as 1 machine. ability to scale up a normal business app

- people-ready process (people centric biz process)

now- people do the work, human interaction,ui,tasks and roles, office/db integration

vnext->rich tool support, pre-built common activities, portal for state and KPI's

-rich connected apps

now- internet, massive user scale, access from anywhere, compose services, multiple trust domains.

vnext -> pre-built services, network transparency, convenient secure identity, tool support across lifecycle

BizTalk Workgroup Edition

There might be a new edition that would fill a current need in enterprise environments. Some organizations are running a central core for operations, and need a BTS box out in each distribution center you have. The licensing is too expensive in this model. MS is thinking of releasing a version that would be less expensive, but would only work with other BTS servers in their workgroup, in the situation above, it would be only those core enterprise BTS servers. Interesting idea.

 

There was some great talk on the new adapter framework, but that is for another post.

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