How can Visio Stencil for BizTalk Server help you documenting BizTalk Infrastructures or Integration projects

Some time ago, I do not remember when or where I was asked to provide some examples of diagrams that I use in my documentation or some diagrams representations in which I use the Visio Stencils for BizTalk Server

I know that no one likes to create documentation, is boring, it can be a challenging task, but documentation is an important part of every BizTalk Integration project or for infrastructures operations management and administration. They will help you in many critical situations and will reduce the time needed to carry out different procedures like finding where the machines are hosted, how many machines your environment has, what are the actors (systems, protocols) in a given solution, and so on. You can have at least three types of documentation when it comes to BizTalk:

• Infrastructure Overview
• Solution Overview
• Technical Overview

Or as Steef-Jan mentioned in one of these posts:

• BizTalk Environment (Design) document
• Functional Design of BizTalk Solution
• Technical (Design) of BizTalk Solution

Visio is great for creating multiple kinds of diagrams, unfortunately, the set of stencils and shapes, which out-of-the-box come with Visio probably is not sufficient to cover the kinds of diagrams we need with our BizTalk/Integration projects or they are not easy to use and read. Visio 2013 Stencil for BizTalk Server and Visio 2010 Stencil for BizTalk Server can easily help you create documentation for the first two: BizTalk Environment (Design) document and Functional Design of BizTalk Solution. They are a collection of 73 modern flat Visio 2013 shapes that will help you represent BizTalk Server physical architectures, Integration architectures (Cloud or Hybrid scenarios), or solutions diagrams in Visio 2013 and 2010.

Infrastructure Overview Samples

This logical diagram describes the overview of your BizTalk environments where you can specify the Infrastructure of your production, UAT, testing, or developer environments.

Here are some samples of:

• Complex logical diagram of your Infrastructure

• Basic logical diagram of your Infrastructure

• Or for example, a diagram representing a logical diagram of your BizTalk Group and Host Infrastructure

Solution Overview Samples

This logical diagram depicts a view of the solution. It will describe how the solution will work, who are the actors, what type of protocols are, and so on.

Here are some samples of solution diagrams:

• Complex logical diagrams

• Or a basic logical diagram

This documentation should be available to all stakeholders within your organization: developer, operation, and administration team.

Contrary to what many might think some kind of documentation is pretty straightforward and can be realized with minimal effort but have enormous importance in the organization when you need to make changes inside your solution or infrastructure.

Download

You can download BizTalk Infrastructure and Solution Overview Samples from GitHub here: