Last month, I held a presentation at the Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event (26 – 27 September) along with fellow MVPs: Steef-Jan Wiggers, Nino Crudele, Saravana Kumar, and two distinguished community members: Lex Hegt and our host, Tord G. Nordahl. This was the biggest BizTalk event organized in Norway (Stavanger) this year, with a total of 50 people attending this two-day event.
But before talking about the event, let me tell you about my crazy trip.
📝 One-Minute Brief
This post chronicles Sandro Pereira’s journey to the Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event in Stavanger, Norway. Despite a “crazy” travel experience involving diverted flights and bus trips across borders, the event was a massive success. It featured expert sessions from global MVPs on topics like Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI (BizTalk as PaaS), Throttling, and BizTalk360. The post highlights the collaborative spirit of the BizTalk community and provides a link to Sandro’s presentation on cloud integration.
The journey
Everything was planned to leave a day before the event from Porto (Portugal) at 11:40 (less one hour than Norway) and arrive at Stavanger (Norway) near 20:00 (local time) – with stops in Frankfurt and Oslo – and everything was going well until I got to Oslo, and this is where the fun begins… Because of some technical problems in fuel supply, which prevented the departure of aircraft from Oslo airport and caused the aircraft’s parking space available in the airport to reach its limit, my flight could not land at the intended destination and was diverted to… Gothenburg (Sweden) is 400 km from Oslo!
Solution: I had to make the trip from Gothenburg to Oslo by bus (4 hour trip) than I was forced to spend the night at the airport hotel in Oslo – check-in made at 3 AM and check-out at 4 AM – and take the first flight to Stavanger at 7 AM which enabled me to arrive 1 hour before the event start… yeaahhhh finally, without sleep but I managed to arrive on time.
The event
As I mentioned earlier, this was a two-day event. The first day was filled with presentations made by 6 speakers:
- The first session was MVP Steef-Jan Wiggers talking about Adapter Pack Integration Capabilities – Best practice, and a presentation of the versatile integration capabilities of the adapter pack.
- The second was made by myself talking about Windows Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI features, or as we now know: BizTalk as PaaS (BizTalk on the cloud) – introducing bridges for EAI and EDI, how to manage EDI message exchanges and trading partners with the Azure EDI Portal; Schemas and map transformations.
- The third session was our host, Tord Nordahl, talking about Throttling and thresholds – the importance and the capabilities of thresholds and throttling in BizTalk.
- The fourth was MVP Saravana Kumar talking about Administer, Operate, Support, and Monitor your BizTalk environment efficiently using BizTalk360 – this tool is becoming a revolution when it comes to monitoring BizTalk.
- The fifth session was Lex Hegt talking about some real-life scenarios with BizTalk360.
- And the final session was made by MVP Nino Crudele about BizTalk assessment and architecture review – good scenarios as well, providing a document as a guideline to show some more on how a setup and documentation should be.
You can download my presentation here: Windows Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI
This day was wrapped up by Tord, and after this, we had a few hours break with some beers and wine, and ended up with an awesome dinner with the attendees and the Bouvet staff.
The second day was hands-on labs, each speaker had their own room and hourly time slots, where the attendees could come in and had the opportunity to meet, discuss their issues, ask questions, or share their experience with the speakers.
This day started calmly for me, only one person but a great conversation hour, but every slot started to have more people and at the end of the day I was the last to finished with Tord calling to my mobile phone saying “we were going to miss the boat and that the taxi is already here” and me replying “don’t bother me let me finish” hehe.
The end
After the event had ended, unfortunately, Steef-Jan and Saravana had to go back home, but Lex and I, Nino, we had the pleasure of spending two days in Tord’s house with this amazing family, traveling a little, visiting the country, and having a little fun!
The two days at the Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event were a great experience for me, and I had the pleasure of meeting great people. I like to thank Tord and Bouvet for organizing the event. This was the third event of the BizTalk Innovation Event series this year; the previous events were organized in Utrecht (The Netherlands) and Milan (Italy).
Our next venue as speakers will probably be next year in London, and after that in Porto.
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