BizTalk Summit 2014 London – The story

Posted: March 21, 2014  |  Categories: BizTalk Events

2013 was a big year for us in term of events: BizTalk Summit 2013 London, Oporto BizTalk Innovation Day, Bouvet Innovation Day and finally BizTalk Innovation Day Italy… but we promise that 2014 would start even bigger and better!

Nearly 200 attendees (an increase of 56% compared with the previous year), more than 100 different companies across 20 countries were present in this event. 12 Microsoft Integration MVP’s from across the world (USA, Canada, India, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and of course the UK) and 2 members of Microsoft Product group were present as a speaker! These are some of the numbers that reflect the huge success of this event!

BizTalk Summit 2014 Speakers

And viewing all the comments (Day 1 and Day 2 summary from tweets, what did the attendees say)… we did it! Of course, this was not possible without all the effort and commitment of Saravana Kumar and all his BizTalk360 team (~6 months on this project) that make this a remarkable event!

The journey

As almost of the speakers and many attendees, I arrived on Saturday, March 1, thereby enjoying the weekend to meet London city a little more and chat with my fellows MVPs and members of the BizTalk Community.

BizTalk Summit 2014 Visit London
BizTalk Summit 2014 Visit London
BizTalk Summit 2014 Visit London
BizTalk Summit 2014 Visit London

The event

My session was on the second day of the event in the afternoon. And was all about BizTalk Mapping Patterns where I tried to address and explain some common mapper problems, specifying best practices and some of the best ways to address common problems by choosing the right approach and a small introduction to WABS maps where I address the key differences between BizTalk Server and BizTalk Services maps, key problems in migrating BizTalk Server to BizTalk Services maps and some WABS maps samples.

BizTalk Summit 2014 Sandro Pereira

Unfortunately, because of time restrictions, I had to be very brief showing only key concepts and not getting deep on many of the topics. But in overall I was pleased with the end result and all the people, and people can find out more details on these topics when my eBook become available.

But let’s go back to the beginning…

Day 1

The first day started at 7 am with the progress of the registration which occurred very smoothly. And after a quick kick-off at 8:45 by the hand of Saravana Kumar the Microsoft Product Group took the stage, first by Guru Venkataraman that start his presentation by saying “On-prem is real and here to stay!” and also explaining the BizTalk Server roadmap and the new version: BizTalk Server 2013 R2 that they are preparing and the Windows Azure BizTalk Services roadmap.

Being succeeded by Harish Kumar Agarwal that explain in detail all the Windows Azure BizTalk Services features updates that went into the February release.

BizTalk Summit 2014 Guru
BizTalk Summit 2014 Harish Agarwal

After the Microsoft Product Group was time for the Microsoft integration MVPs to take the stage for them, two more sessions were carried out in the morning:

  • Jon Fancey presented a session about how you can move to BizTalk Services, explaining the advantages and challenges you can expect in moving to the cloud
  • And Saravana Kumar covered in his session some of the key capabilities of BizTalk360 and demonstrated how to improve your operations (monitoring and management) in your BizTalk environment using BizTalk360.
BizTalk Summit 2014 Jon Fancey
BizTalk Summit 2014 Saravana Kumar

The afternoon started with a monster on the stage that doesn’t need any introduction: Richard Seroter that gave us an overview of the existing integration tool and how to choose the right one for the right scenario. However, Richard was not alone and was followed by two great sessions:

  • Tord Glad Nordahl with an excellent and kind of provocative (in a good sense and intentional) session about How we/you can mess up the BizTalk environments! Proving excellent tips and tricks not only for admin but also to developers in what you can do and should avoid doing.
  • And Stephen W. Thomas that gave us a look at Windows Azure IaaS and how best to leverage it with BizTalk Server 2013. Providing also awesome PowerShell scripts for configuring and managing your VM in the cloud.
BizTalk Summit 2014 Richard Seroter
BizTalk Summit 2014 Tord Nordahl
BizTalk Summit 2014 Stephen Thomas

And finally the day 1 finish with a Q&A session with Microsoft Product Group and a couple of MVP’s, special reference to the presence of Michael Stephenson on this session:

BizTalk Summit 2014 Michael Stephenson

After that was time to talk with the attendees, some social network with some beers and speaker dinners at Browns.

BizTalk Summit 2014 speaker dinners

Day 2

The second day started at 9 am with four amazing sessions carried out in the morning:

  • The first one that took the stage was Kent Weare that give us a look into mobile services, presenting a real-world business scenario using many of Windows Azure building blocks like Azure Service Bus and Azure Mobile Services; and BizTalk Server 2013
  • Steef-Jan Wiggers was the second, and as always he made a great session about Manageability of Windows Azure BizTalk Services were he focused on the tools that are available for managing WABS solutions.
  • Is not every day that you can see a session about BAM, and I personally like this topic, and Dan Rosanova was the person responsible for this topic! And what a great job. It was one of my favorite’s talks/topics! He was able to walk through and show us real-world BAM implementations covering all the key concept of BAM.
  • The last in the morning was Johan Hedberg, who lost a bet and had to wear a Canada shirt during his presentation, but he was not intimidated and made a good session on how to use BizTalk Server together with SQL Server Master Data Services.
BizTalk Summit 2014 Kent Weare
BizTalk Summit 2014 Steef-Jan
BizTalk Summit 2014 Dan Rosanova
BizTalk Summit 2014 Johan Hedberg

The afternoon started, in my personal opinion, with the best session of the event and with an “animal” on the stage: Nino Crudele, in addition of captivate and put the whole audience laughing, Nino was able to present an awesome add-in to Visual Studio “btsgnosaddin” that will make the lives of all BizTalk developers much better and easy! This will be a tool that all BizTalk developers must have!

This session was followed by two more sessions:

  • Sandro Pereira (me), who better than me to succeed my good friend Nino.
  • And the last one to take the stage was Sam Vanhoutte that gave us a session about Running durable workflows in the cloud and on-prem. Providing an overview of the Workflow Manager and showing awesome hybrid demo applications using Twilio.
BizTalk Summit 2014 Nino Crudele
BizTalk Summit 2014 Sandro Pereira
BizTalk Summit 2014 Sam Vanhoutte

Once again, for me 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 and the BizTalk Crew, Microsoft, BizTalk360 crew members and special all the attendees!

After the event

After the event was time to relax and enjoy the last night in London in the company of friends and fellow BizTalk Community members.

BizTalk Summit 2014 after event

Stay tuned on the BizTalk Innovation Day Facebook page to learn more about our upcoming events!

Key point/resources to take into considerations

  1. btsgnosaddin” addin to Visual Studio that will be provided by Microsoft Integration MVP Nino Crudele for free!
  2. PowerShell scripts to configure and manage your VM in the cloud that will be provided by Microsoft Integration MVP Stephen W. Thomas for free!
  3. BizTalk Mapping Patterns and Best Practices eBook that will be provided by Microsoft Integration MVP Sandro Pereira (me) for free!
  4. All the session will be available online soon in the BizTalk360 webpage
Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community.

3 thoughts on “BizTalk Summit 2014 London – The story”

  1. I attended this event first time and found it really helpful and entertaining. Nice summary of the event. Sandro your session was great. Looking forward to get your ebook.

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