Brennan’s Blog

It was the first time I have been out to the Microsoft office. If you have a chance to go, it is worth it just to see the photos on the wall.

For the topic, Chris Kabat walked through a business process with Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). I have created software to handle workflows with business logic using just the .NET Framework and custom code, but it was interesting to see the BizTalk approach. It was very graphical, yet still pretty powerful. At the end of the presentation we talked about when it would be appropriate to use this solution when a certain amount of coding with C# can achieve a similar result. In the past my clients have opted to hand code their business processes, so I was interested in what everyone had to say.

It is clear that one person can crank out of a lot of work using BAM, especially when you can have the business managers mock up the business processes in Visio. Essentially the business user can knock out the skeleton and then pass that over to the development team to fill in the details which can be deployed to the BizTalk server.

I also asked the Microsoft representative, Nick Zimmer, if he had any trial software available. He left for a moment and came back with several boxes full of goodies. The best part is the Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition with a free license. I have used virtualization heavily this past year, and intend to recommend it as often as I can. And when you see the licensing changes for enterprise distribution, you will be tempted to move to Virtual Server as well.

Take note that the next Wisconsin BizTalk User Group will be at the Microsoft office in Waukesha on Wednesday starting at 6:00pm. Chris Kabat will be presenting an end-to-end overview of Business Activity Monitoring from ODBA to the BAM Portal. This is a very new User Group, so be sure to spread the word!