128 attendees, more than 70 different companies across 16 countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, USA), more than 10 Microsoft Integration MVP’s present (speakers, Q&A members and attendees) and 3 members of Microsoft Product group, these are some of the numbers that reflect the huge success of this event! This was the first time in the UK that has been conducted a full-day event dedicated to Microsoft BizTalk Server.
I have to congratulate and say thanks, Saravana Kumar, Microsoft and BizTalk360 for well organize this magnificent event!
The journey
I arrive on 15 January to Gatwick Airport in London without problems or setbacks – Saravana was waiting for me at the airport – We went visit BizTalk360 Office and Saravana home ad then we return to the airport to pick up Nino Crudele. The next step was to go meet the remaining members of BizTalk Crew (Nino Crudele, Saravana Kumar, Tord Glad Nordahl, Steef-Jan Wiggers and me) along with Rui Machado (my coworker) and Michael Stephenson for a very nice dinner.
The event
As I mentioned earlier the event was a huge success. My session was in the afternoon after the Q&A session and I have to confess I was a little nervous about being in the presence of 140 BizTalk experts! And because Guru Venkataraman and Ravi Krishnaswamy from Microsoft Product Group talked in the keynote and in the Q & A session, some of the basics on the subject I would speak “Windows Azure BizTalk Services” or “Windows Azure EAI & EDI Labs”… I decided to risk a little further and make the session more practical, not spending too much time on the slides, and made for the first time one demo from scratch during my session!!! In the end, I presented 3 demos:
- EAI SQL Demo: A basic integration scenario “Registration to the event” where we send messages to the cloud (EAI Bridge), then we apply a transformation and send this message to one system on-premise using LOB Targets and Service Bus Connect and then get the response back – So a very simple scenario.
- Customers Orders Routing Demo: The second is a more elaborate scenario: “Order Scenario” – the goal is to send order messages to the cloud (EAI Bridge), apply transformation, Enrich properties in the Bridge (like Property promotion) and Route messages; and treat them in different ways – different transformation, different endpoint like queues or different lob targets: if is a top priority message we need to put the message in SQL table on-premise, it is a normal message we put in an Azure Queue and if was an invalid message we put the message in another SQL table on-premise… this demo will show also how can we apply filters.
- EDI Demo: The last demo will be an EDI DEMO where we will see how to configure trading partners, agreements and EDI Bridges… they send these EDI messages to an on-premise system (SQL)
But fortunately, I received many good reviews from the attendees, either after the session or during breaks or by email… for that… thank you very very very much!!!
But let’s go back to the beginning… The registrations started at 8 AM and progress very smoothly, however, the event would start with a few minutes late due to a falling helicopter in London which caused the backwardness of two member of Microsoft Product group and attendees.
The event started at 9:15 by the hand of Saravana Kumar who made the introduction of all speaker, the agenda of the day and health and safety information, after that one rare moment in Europe… our very special guest the Microsoft Product group (Guru Venkataraman and Ravi Krishnaswamy) made the Keynote of the event. Both Guru and Ravi showcased some of the core features that are added to BizTalk Server 2013, Azure BizTalk Services, and more importantly, they demonstrated Microsoft commitment on BizTalk server and openly commented there will be more versions of BizTalk Server.
After the keynote was carried out two more sessions in the morning:
- Steef-Jan Wiggers presented a session about the new cloud-related adapters (WCF-BasicHttpRelay, WCF-NetTcpRelay, SB-Messaging, and WCF-WebHttp.) that’s going to ship with BizTalk Server 2013 demonstrating the characteristics of each adapter with a demo!
- Saravana Kumar demonstrated in its session how to improve your operations (monitoring and management) in your BizTalk environment using BizTalk360.
The afternoon started with Q&A panel with Kent Brown and Ravi Krishnaswamy from Microsoft Product Group joined by Charles Young, Jon Fancey (Microsoft Integration MVP) and Michael Stephenson (Microsoft Integration MVP)… and what a great session!!! Many of the questions were targeted to Kent and Ravi about roadmaps both on cloud and on-premise and despite some question were complicated to answer, none of them went unanswered and were very well accompanied by the other panel members.
After the Q&A I took the stage with my session about Windows Azure Service EAI/EDI Labs (or Windows Azure BizTalk Services) that I already described in detail. After I leave the stage, were presented two more sessions:
- Nino Crudele presented a session about BizTalk assessment and architecture review with real scenarios, if some of the attendees didn’t know Nino, they never will forget with his session full of great content and extremely hilarious! Nino is the kind of speaker that captivates any audience even the camera crew couldn’t stop laughing.
- And finally Tord Glad Nordahl with is an excellent session where he explained some of the platform improvements in Windows Server 2012 and SQL server 2012 that can have an impact in BizTalk Server 2013
This day was wrapped up by Saravana Kumar and after this with have time to talk weed the attendees – some social network – and have some beers after the event.
Once again, it was excellent and an honor to participate in this event along with all these amazing people that were responsible for this happens: the speakers (BizTalk Crew), Microsoft, BizTalk360 crew members and special all the attendees! It was good to have a chat and meet many amazing people like Naushad Alam, Charles Young, Stephen W. Thomas, Tarun Kumar Garg, Peter Vervoorn, Daniel Bautista Sanz, Ashwin Prabhu, Fabio Marini and many more (sorry if you are not mentioned here, you are so many! – Leave me a comment).
After the event
After the event has ended, unfortunately, Tord had to go back home, but the rest of the team accompanied by Rui Machado and Stephen W. Thomas enjoyed themselves a little, visiting and getting to know the City of London
Our next event will be organized by me and my company DevScope and will be in Portugal in March 2013. See you there!
I said I would forget to mention many people… but I’ll try to fix this by putting comments!
I was already forgetting Tim Jonker with whom I had a nice conversation … imagine in Portuguese!
And Kent Brown (Technical Product Manager for Windows Azure at Microsoft)
Hello Sandro,
It was great experience and learning for me. Nino presentation is very special and he connects with audience well.
Tarun