Hard working and always available 'Big Kev' aka Scott Scovell has come up with a gem in his latest blog post.

Grab the sequence and the order of components, as well as finer details around the need to change BizTalk RFID Services from using your default website (usually if Sharepoint is on the box, then it's a good idea to)

Well done Scotty! Nice one.

Well what a week.....I've finally put a media interview that I originally started with Steve Sloan and Christine Bishop for Aussie FEN Magazine. I was there representing the local industry topology around RFID and MS RFID Services.

It was one of those things that as we were all talking, I did have a thought flash across my mind - "Mick if that comment is taken the wrong way, or you say the wrong thing......then you'd better cherish your last MVP year :)"

Coming through the other side and a Podcast later - it's all looking very cool. There's some great news to be released in this space....more on this later.

Anush Kumar Mr RFID Services himself - had a ball at the R2 Launch and we got to once again hang out. All superb!
There's a handful of people who you meet in your travels that are just great guys.....he's one! And I'm overlooking the fact he wants to get out there on the cricket pitch and play for India!
http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkrfid/archive/2007/09/28/other-biztalk-rfid-ers-in-blogosphere.aspx - it's all true folks :)

Another guy who's making huge leaps and bounds in the RFID space is our very own Scott Scovell. Scott and I are working on some serious RFID stuff at the moment and he also has a wealth of stories/knowledge from right down at the coal face in not only implementing BizTalk RFID Services but a very good head for the whole integration environment. Stay tuned....... I promise we'll share soon :)

Rocking and rolling.....

I was onsite the other day on a WinXP machine doing some work. I had a few moments to kill before I entered the time of 'men are men....and women are satisfied' and had to perform (something close :)

I came across http://universal-vista-inspirat.en.softonic.com/ie/screenshots

These guys have done some great work around the screen, UI, control panel, applets and there's even a MacOS x still chooser bar......stacks of options. (e.g. I love the number of 'bounces' an icon will do when you double click on it to launch the app) - all free.

This has got the big thumbs up from me..... I'm very tempted to install XP just for this theme!

A friend of mine Dan, gave a great recount of his very first experience with BizTalk when I came in and built a prototype in a couple of days (no pressure or anything - not that the business decision makers were watching over my shoulder at every move). Later I realised that Dan's company was doing the 'Pepsi' challenge on me, by giving Microsoft and the others a set of 25 tasks to do within the integration space.

No pre-canned demos, real live sink or swim stuff. Two days later I came out of the 'Tribal Council' with immunity and they had a great path forward. I then went on to help them with their actual implementations.

Dan recounts a little of this encounter here - http://techtalkblogs.com/blog/archive/2007/10/10/3221.aspx

I came across this article some time ago and always needed a reference to it.

So I thought I'd pin it to my mental noteboard in the sky for all to share.....

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/6a13cd9f-4b44-40d6-85aa-c70a8e5c34fe1033.mspx?pf=true

Great article on how much MOSS/WSS can handle, from speed differences with site enumerations through to max elements in lists and doc libraries. Some very good numbers

Enjoy!

Monitoring tends to be one of those areas that's overlooked until you hit Defcon 5 in production, servers are melting all over the floor, people are suddenly disappearing and cashing in on their time owing, and there's not one business process in site...... sound familiar?

I've always been fascinated at given the price of MOM (mega cheap) why people don't have effective monitoring solutions in place - it's not rocket science to setup.....or you could have the work experience kid watching the lights on the front of the servers to make sure they're on! :)

Here's some details from the R2 Management pack....check them out.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561939.aspx 

snippet of the msdn page - BTW at the bottom it mentions MOM2005, this will also work in Operation Manager 2007

------------------------------------------

The Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack enables you to:

• Monitor BizTalk Server events.
  
• Collect BizTalk Server-specific performance counters in one central location.
  
• Raise alerts that require operator intervention.
  

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack contains rules that cover the following categories:

• Availability Monitoring
  Availability monitoring rules monitor the availability of service from computers running BizTalk Server. Unavailability of the BizTalk Server service, receive locations, and databases are issues that cause the BizTalk Server service to become unavailable to a client or a user. Availability monitoring rules have names prefixed with "Service Unavailable.”
  
• Health Monitoring
  Health monitoring rules monitor for different types of errors in BizTalk Server that require operator intervention. There are four types of health monitoring rules, which have names prefixed with "Error," "Critical Error," "Warning," and "Information:"
  
  • Error: Errors are events that usually represent processing problems with individual messages. In isolation they represent problems that can be rectified either at the sender end or the receiver end of a message transmission.
    
  • Critical Error: Critical errors represent events that indicate a significant problem has occurred. This can affect a large degree of functionality of BizTalk Server.
    
  • Warning: Warnings are typically problems that are intermittent in nature. They do not represent major problems in operation and may be considered lower priority compared to other alerts.
    
  • Information: Information alerts include information about BizTalk Server. These messages are neither errors nor warnings.
    
• Utilization/Performance Tracking
  Utilization/performance tracking rules enable you to monitor the operationally relevant performance counters for BizTalk Server. These are divided into measurement rules and comparison rules.
  

Availability Monitoring

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Core rule group contains the following rules to address availability monitoring, that is, monitoring related to whether BizTalk Server is currently operable, and able to process work. All of the rules are configured to suppress duplicate alerts for identical event content. This means that a repeat count will be incremented for a single alert rather than seeing multiple alert instances in the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Operator Console. This helps to avoid a flood of alerts that an administrator must deal with; too much information can be as problematic as too little. None of the rules contain automated responses, such as e-mail/pager notifications, though you can easily add these as needed.

Rule Name	Enabled
Service Unavailable: A receive location is shutting down.	Yes
Service Unavailable: All receive locations are being temporarily disabled because either the MessageBox or Configuration database is not available.	Yes
Service Unavailable: BAM Portal cannot connect to Primary Import Database - Login failed.	Yes
Service Unavailable: BizTalk HTTP receive adapter failed to initialize itself.	Yes
Service Unavailable: Error connecting to the BAM Primary Import Database - Db not found.	Yes
Service Unavailable: Failed to connect to BizTalk Management database.	Yes
Service Unavailable: Failed to initialize UPM profile context.	Yes
Service Unavailable: The Messaging Engine could not contact the SSO server.	Yes
Service Unavailable: The Messaging Engine encountered an error initializing a receive adapter.	Yes
Service Unavailable: The Messaging Engine failed to initialize a transport adapter.	Yes

Health Monitoring

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Core rule group contains the following rules to address health monitoring, that is, monitoring related to various non-fatal failure modes. Typically, the situation may be isolated to individual interchanges or may possibly resolve itself. The BizTalk Server service is still, in some capacity, able to process work. The primary intent of these rules is to provide operations staff with information relating to messages that are stuck in the system and that require manual intervention of some sort, and to give them the information required to rectify the root problem.

All of these rules are configured to suppress duplicate alerts for identical event content. This means that a repeat count will be incremented for a single alert rather than seeing multiple alert instances in the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Operator Console. None of the rules contain automated responses, but you can easily add such responses if necessary.

Rule Name	Enabled
Consolidate Inbound Message Rejected on Authentication Failure	Yes
Critical Error: A BizTalk host instance has stopped and is not processing information.	Yes
Critical Error: A BizTalk subservice has failed while executing a service request	Yes
Critical Error: A stored procedure call failed.	Yes
Critical Error: Monitor BizTalk NT Service Availability	Yes
Critical Error: The Messaging Engine failed to register an adapter.	Yes
Critical Error: The Messaging Engine failed to retrieve the configuration from the database.	Yes
Critical Error: The MSMQT subservice failed to start because Windows MSMQ service is running on the computer.	Yes
Error connecting to the BAM Primary Import Database – DB server not found	Yes
Error: A message going to a one-way send port is being suspended. The send port configuration corresponding to the message was not found.	Yes
Error: A receive location is invalid or incorrectly configured.	Yes
Error: A response message is suspended.	Yes
Error: An adapter raised an error during message processing.	Yes
Error: An attempt to connect to a BizTalk database failed.	Yes
Error: An outbound message is being suspended by the adapter.	Yes
Error: BAM Interceptor detected a SQL Exception	Yes
Error: BAM Portal Encountered Internal Server Error	Yes
Error: BAM Portal Encountered Internal Server Exception - Web Services may have received badly-formatted requests	Yes
Error: BAM Technical Assistance Required	Yes
Error: Connection to a SMTP host failed	Yes
Error: Error connecting to the BAM Primary Import Database - Referenced DB not found	Yes
Error: Failed to archive the processed message.	Yes
Error: Failed to delete processed message	Yes
Error: Failed to un-mark the file	Yes
Error: FILE-Receive-Message Suspended	Yes
Error: FTP-Receive-Message Suspended	Yes
Error: HTTP-Receive-Message Suspended	Yes
Error: Invalid IC Schema Error	Yes
Error: Messaging Engine has suspended a message. Failed to correlate a response message to an existing request message.	Yes
Error: MQSeries-Receive-Message Suspended	Yes
Error: MSMQ-Receive-Message Suspended	Yes
Error: Orchestration instance suspended due to errors, needs manual intervention	Yes
Error: POP3 adapter could not authenticate to the server using supplied credentials	Yes
Error: POP3 adapter could not establish connection with the POP3 server	Yes
Error: POP3-Receive-Message Suspended	Yes
Error: SMTP send adapter could not authenticate with the SMTP server	Yes
Error: SOAP-Receive-Message Suspended	Yes
Error: SQL-Receive-Message Suspended	Yes
Error: The FILE send adapter cannot open file for writing.	Yes
Error: The host instance failed to connect to the BizTalk Configuration database.	Yes
Error: The HTTP send adapter cannot connect to the remote server.	Yes
Error: The Messaging Engine is dropping the message due to an authentication failure.	Yes
Error: The processed file is either read-only or a system file.	Yes
Error: There was a failure executing a receive pipeline at an http receive location.	Yes
Error: There was a failure executing a receive pipeline.	No
Generic Error: All error events from BizTalk Server 2006	No
Generic Information: All information events from BizTalk Server 2006	No
Generic Warning: All warning events from BizTalk Server 2006	No
Information: A BizTalk Server Host Instance Windows Service Has Stopped	No
Information: Mismatched Interceptor Configuration	Yes
The Messaging Engine has suspended one or more inbound message(s).	No
The Messaging Engine has suspended one or more outbound message(s).	No
There was a failure executing a send pipeline.	No
There was an error executing a pipeline component.	No
Warning: Cube DTS has not been run	Yes
Warning: FILE receive adapter cannot reach a receive location due to network problems	Yes
Warning: TDDS failed to batch execution of streams	Yes
Warning: The Messaging Engine encountered an error publishing a batch of messages.	Yes

Utilization/Performance Tracking

There are two types of performance rules within MOM: measurement rules and comparison rules. Measurement rules gather data from Microsoft Windows performance counters, or other data sources, with a specified sampling rate between 5 and 15 minutes and store the data for historical analysis. Comparison rules allow actions to be taken and alerts to be raised when a given performance value varies by a specified threshold from expected values, which can include averages of past samples. Some of the comparison rules require customization based on your particular environment. In addition, you can change the default sampling rates as needed based on your environment.

The table below shows the performance rules for the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Core rule group.

Note
All of the counter values for the BizTalk Tracking Data Decode Service (TDDS), otherwise known as the BAM Event Bus Service, performance object are stored with 15 minute samples.

Note
Within the XLANG/s Orchestrations performance object, all counters are stored with 15 minute samples, except the following: Megabytes Allocated Private Memory, Orchestrations Created, Orchestrations Created/sec.

Measurement Rule Name	Enabled
BizTalk Messaging Active Receive Locations	Yes
BizTalk Messaging Inbound Latency	Yes
BizTalk Messaging Outbound Latency	Yes
BizTalk Messaging Request-Response Latency	Yes
BizTalk Messaging Request-Response Timeouts	Yes
BizTalk: WSS Adapter % Web Service Call Failures	No
BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Receive Commit Failures	Yes
BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Receive Message Failures	Yes
BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Received Messages	Yes
BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Send Message Failures	Yes
BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Sent Messages	Yes
BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Web Service Call Failures	Yes
BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Web Service Calls/sec	Yes
BizTalk:TDDS Total Events	Yes
BizTalk:TDDS Total Records	Yes
BizTalk:TDDS-Total Failed Events	Yes
CPU Usage BizTalk Machines	Yes
CPU Usage BizTalk Server Process	Yes
CPU Usage BizTalk Server Processes	Yes
CPU Usage BizTalk Servers	Yes
Documents processed	Yes
Documents processed/sec	Yes
Documents received	Yes
Documents received/sec	Yes
Documents suspended	Yes
Documents suspended/sec	Yes
FILE receive Adapter Bytes	Yes
FILE Receive Adapter Bytes/Sec	Yes
FILE Receive Adapter Messages Received / Sec	Yes
FILE Receive Adapter-Messages received	Yes
FILE Send Adapter Bytes	Yes
FILE Send Adapter Bytes/Sec	Yes
FILE Send Adapter Messages Sent / Sec	Yes
FILE Send Adapter-Messages Sent	Yes
FTP Receive Adapter Bytes Received	Yes
FTP Receive Adapter Bytes Received/sec	Yes
FTP Receive Adapter Messages Received	Yes
FTP Receive Adapter Messages Received/Sec	Yes
FTP Send Adapter Bytes	Yes
FTP Send Adapter Bytes/Sec	Yes
FTP Send Adapter Messages Sent	Yes
FTP Send Adapter Messages/Second	Yes
Host - Instance State Message References - BizTalkServerInProcessHost	Yes
Host Queue Size - All BizTalk Hosts	Yes
Host Suspended Queue Size - All BizTalk Hosts	Yes
HostQ - Instances - BizTalkServerInProcessHost	Yes
HTTP Receive Adapter Messages Received / Sec	Yes
HTTP Receive Adapter Response Messages Sent / Sec	Yes
HTTP Receive Adapter-Messages received	Yes
HTTP Receive Adapter-Response Messages sent	Yes
HTTP Send Adapter Messages Received	Yes
HTTP Send Adapter Messages Received/Sec	Yes
HTTP Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec	Yes
HTTP Send Adapter-Messages Sent	Yes
ID Process	Yes
Logical Disk %Free Space BizTalk Servers	Yes
MessageBox databases connection failures	Yes
MessageBox Dead Processes Cleanup	Yes
MessageBox Instances Size	Yes
MessageBox Msg Cleanup	Yes
MessageBox Parts Cleanup	Yes
MessageBox Spool Size	Yes
MessageBox Tracked Message Copy	Yes
MessageBox Tracking Data Size	Yes
MSMQ Receive Adapter Bytes Received	Yes
MSMQ Receive Adapter Bytes/Sec	Yes
MSMQ Receive Adapter Messages Received	Yes
MSMQ Receive Adapter Messages Received/Sec	Yes
MSMQ Send Adapter Bytes Sent	Yes
MSMQ Send Adapter Bytes/Sec	Yes
MSMQ Send Adapter Messages Sent	Yes
MSMQ Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec	Yes
Orchestrations completed	Yes
Orchestrations completed/sec	Yes
Orchestrations Created	Yes
Orchestrations Created/sec	Yes
Orchestrations dehydrated	Yes
Orchestrations dehydrated/sec	Yes
Orchestrations discarded	Yes
Orchestrations discarded/sec	Yes
Orchestrations rehydrated	Yes
Orchestrations rehydrated/sec	Yes
Orchestrations resident in-memory	Yes
Orchestrations suspended	Yes
Orchestrations suspended/sec	Yes
Orchestrations-% used physical memory	Yes
Orchestrations-Database transactions	Yes
Orchestrations-Database transactions/sec	Yes
Orchestrations-Dehydratable orchestrations	Yes
Orchestrations-Dehydrating orchestrations	Yes
Orchestrations-Idle orchestrations	Yes
Orchestrations-Megabytes allocated private memory-<All>-15.0-minutes	Yes
Orchestrations-Megabytes allocated virtual memory	Yes
Orchestrations-Pending messages	Yes
Orchestrations-Pending work items	Yes
Physical Disk %Idle Time BizTalk Servers	Yes
Physical Disk Average Disk Queue Length BizTalk Server	Yes
POP3 Receive Adapter Active Sessions	Yes
POP3 Receive Adapter Bytes Received	Yes
POP3 Receive Adapter Bytes/Sec	Yes
POP3 Receive Adapter Messages Received	Yes
POP3 Receive Adapter Messages Received/Sec	Yes
Runnable orchestrations	Yes
Running orchestrations	Yes
SMTP Send Adapter Messages Sent	Yes
SMTP Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec	Yes
SOAP Receive Adapter Messages Received	Yes
SOAP Receive Adapter Messages Received /Sec	Yes
SOAP Send Adapter Messages Sent	Yes
SOAP Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec	Yes
SQL Receive Adapter Messages Received	Yes
SQL Receive Adapter Messages Received/Sec	Yes
SQL Send Adapter Messages Sent	Yes
SQL Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec	Yes

Comparison Rule Name	Enabled
Monitor Host Suspended Q Size	No
Monitor HostQ Size	No
Monitor HostQ Size - BizTalkServerApplication	No
Monitor MessageBox Instances Size	No
Monitor MessageBox Spool Size	No
Monitor MessageBox Tracking Data Size	No
Total Failed BAM Events During Flush	Yes
Total TDDS Events Failed Exceeded Limit	No
Total TDDS Failed Batches Exceeded Limit	No
Warning: BizTalk Throttled on High Database Size for a significant period	Yes
Warning: BizTalk Throttled on High Inprocess Message Count for a significant period	Yes
Warning: BizTalk Throttled on High Process Memory for a significant period	Yes
Warning: BizTalk Throttled on High Thread Count for a significant period	Yes

Enterprise Single Sign-On Monitoring

Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) is a separate but integral component of BizTalk Server 2006 and BizTalk Server 2006 R2 that enables heterogeneous systems to interoperate by maintaining a secure, central store of configuration information such as passwords. The Microsoft Enterprise Single Sign-On Management Pack monitors the availability of SSO. Because SSO is primarily security-focused, any alerts raised from SSO might indicate security issues, and thus are of high importance.

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack must be deployed to monitor SSO. After importing the Enterprise Single Sign-On Management Pack, you must associate the Enterprise Single Sign-On rule group with the BizTalk Server 2006 and the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 computer groups. You should also add the stand-alone SSO computers to the BizTalk Server 2006 and the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 computer groups created by the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack. For more information, see How to Add Enterprise Single Sign-On Computers to the List of Computers Monitored by the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack.

I recently came across this and thought I'd share it with you - keep it handy for those planning meetings :)

Early is good I'm told - for the User group notification.

See you at the next User group meeting :)

An interesting tidbit:

Q. When running Biztalk 'artifacts' on a BizTalk Server - *must* we GAC them all?
...answer soon.....if you haven't figured it out....

It’s been a little while since we’ve got together with TechEd, APEC + the launch of R2...but I’m pretty certain we’re all in a great space going forward J

The launch of BizTalk 2006 R2 was a pretty special event. – What’s new in R2 (ms technet article) for more info.

Big thanks to those of you that came along, hope you got alot out of it (not to mention a copy of Vista Ultimate).
What was the best part for you? For me personally was the fact that so much of the BizTalk product team made the trip across and was there. There to talk to and listen. Hope you had an opportunity to make the most of that.

What’s cooking this month for the group?
You may remember before the launch I had lined up a session on Designing and Building a Reusable BizTalk Framework.

I also want to kick some tyres with you guys and hear how things are progressing along your BizTalk (+ related) journey

Main Event on the night:
- Designing and Building a reusable BizTalk Framework(in R2)

BizTalk 2006 R2 is almost upon us, so this month we’re going to cover a couple of important areas:
1. Designing and develop a reusable BizTalk Framework. This approach will allow you to leverage previous investments within your company’s BizTalk implementations. There are huge benefits in being able to re-apply existing BizTalk applications that have been tested and are known quantities within your solution. The solution we will examine together will leverage EDI/AS2 document processing as well as XML Messaging solutions involving various Messaging Patterns (e.g. Request/Response).
This solution is based on a ‘Process Manager’ Pattern and it’s something I’ve refined over the last 2 years of experience on the coal face.

Meeting details:

When: Oct 31, Food at 6pm, kick off 6.30pm. Finish up around 8pm.
Where: Microsoft
1 Epping Road
Riverside Corporate Park
North Ryde NSW 2113 Australia. (parking available)
Speaker: Mick Badran (your trusty User Group Host)

Add to your calendar from HERE

Reusable Framework Focus Details:
Come and see how to ‘dynamically’ wire your BizTalk Solutions based on message content, rules or specific environmental properties. Being able to accept a wide array of message types is another key element in making these solutions successful.

What’s happening in the BizTalk Community:
BrizTalk.Org – the Brisbane BizTalk user group is always full of new ideas – Dan up there is always doing a great job.
MelBiz.Org – the Melbourne BizTalk user group run by Bill Chesnut (fellow BizTalk MVP) is always doing great things down there.
If you’re in their areas you’re always welcome to pop along.

Share the User Group Soap Box:
I always welcome a new voice and ideas at our group – if you want to share your experiences, thoughts, “I wish I can do..... for my solution...”. Then contact me and I’ll be more than happy to slot you in.
Q. Do you need to have presentation skills: No (just look at me) – can you tell a story in the office or at the pub? Or at a 3 yr old b.day party? – then I want you.
Q. Do I need a PowerPoint Slide Deck? – no!!! *death by powerpoint* is a painful way to go......
Q. Can you capture my ‘best’ side? We take you whichever way you are. J

We’re up for a great night – come along and learn how to make your BizTalk solutions go a long way.
(p.s. Warning: If you’re a *consultant* this session may reduce you to tears J)

The good thing is - this should take you days and not weeks or months! Brilliant.....absolutely brilliant.

It's not all about reading and writing tags and watching the tracking of......to me RFID Services is all about what do you do with it next?

From a BizTalk perspective, RFID services is another msmq/wcf endpoint that provides rich tag data.

From here you can then process the tag read through biztalk - and as was the case in my demo, sent out to Sharepoint to be viewed by InfoPath.

One of the most exciting things around this is that we can get BAM involved to see how we're tracking, tag fulfillment, reading, processing - when orders arrive till when they leave the warehouse floor.

I'll be posting the demo bits that my colleague Scott Scovell & I stayed up till 2am on 'Demo Day' (hey - wouldn't be a demo without those nights/days :) - soon.

To get started you really want a physical reader to get cracking with - DLP RFID Reader make a good one for developers, and one of the folks at MS have written a 'provider' (This is the key with RFID Services) to use this within RFID Services.

Grab them both from here -

Enjoy!!!!

Hands up who's feeling like a second class citizen? R2 launched weeks ago.

Where's the version I can sink my teeth into??

The 120 day Trial Edition is so yesterday....so what's cooking....???

The MSDN Developer edition will be available on/from Wed 26th (US Time),

so Thurs morning or so for us.

In transit with a little time to spare I thought I'd share some thoughts around an area that is set to boom in the near future - 'Business Activity Monitoring'

I know you must be thinking - What? why? who....? what's Mick on about.

Let's have a quick chat on my thoughts:

1. Within the next 3 yrs there is going to be even less 'custom raw code' being written and more 'integration code' within the MS product stack. Of course there will be specific needs, but in general across the board for business related applications - why build it from scratch? will be the reasoning.
   
   We can see this today heavily with the Sharepoint boom - why build an ASP.NET app when you can plug your bits into a WSS V3.0/ASP.NET app?
   
   Many other products such as OCS, Speech Server, MOSS etc etc. are all conducive to integration code. (If you don't have to write 20 000 lines of code - integrate and customise and write 2000. But us developers want to do everything by hand....so in some ways, we're our own worst enemy)
   
   It would not be uncommon to have several products making up a solution.
   
   How do we keep an eye on that? (We could send the work experience kid around the the servers to make sure they are all running well? but how many work exp. kids do we have?)
   
2. BizTalk Services - if we look at the increasingly important role that BizTalk is playing within organisations in providing THE Application Server where WCF Services, Business Processes etc can all be hosted within. Out of the box slicing and dicing of load/capacity and so on. (It will be an interesting time when the finer details are nutted out with IIS 7 WAS - who does what)
   
   As we start building all sorts of systems that require point to point or connectivity between the components, typically we would look to WCF to provide that glue while conforming to standards (e.g. WS-*) future proofing extensions.
   
   We would then need to house those WCF Services and IIS could be an option...... BTS provides fault tolerance and durability around these services as well.
   
   BTS provides not only connectivity at the transport level, but also at the application level such as SAP, Siebel.... all out of the box. Being able to consume, transform and publish services/information at all these levels is one of the things that BizTalk does very well!
   
   Looking into BizTalk Services - things like 'Event buses' and 'Subscribing' to these events seem to be possible. These may span end-to-end on the enterprise so departments will be able to do their own local processing from a 'corporate received event' (just my thoughts at this point) - similiar to MSMQ technology, but with ALOT more functionality.
   
3. Ok - onto the chase....(just had to go and pick my mobile up in the airport lounge - left it somewhere....head's not screwed on right :)
   
   So in essence looking within the next 3 years, systems will be made up of many disparet sub-systems each - we need to get a view of "How are we going?" (in a business context - not the flux capacitor is running well)
   
4. Enter BAM (BizTalk) - Business Activity Monitoring:
   1. Allows for the creation of 'SQL OLAP Cubes' from Business Key Performance Indicators (a business person *can* sit down in Excel and define all these numbers - except my winning lotto numbers...I'm still waiting :) - then hand them the BAM and boom! a cube is born.
      
      This is the way *it MAY* be pitched - but my experience is that it's a Techo that does it - with the business person looking over the shoulder.)
      
      e.g. Order Total, Order Time Taken, Order Average Fulfillment Time, Order Destination.
      
   2. We can populate these cubes (& their values) from WF Workflows, custom .NET code, Business Rules, BizTalk and WCF Services.
      
      That friends is the missing piece to the puzzle. So as your system is crunching away, business intelligence is obtained from the working system in the context that you specify (a fancy way of saying - your business values).
      
      The capture of this information is done through BAM Interceptors (different flavours depending on if it's a Biztalk process, WF Workflow, WCF Service, Buffered, Direct...)
      
      The cool thing is that BAM databases can be aggregated etc. So we may have a business process running in Perth and a similiar in Syd with the end result being viewed in Melb.
      
      All in all - we're in a cube. All the existing BI tools can hook into the Cube as per normal.
      
   3. How can I interpret and work with my cubes? I've heard MOSS has 'dashboards' and other things that may help me......
      
      ENTER THE DRAGON......no I meant to say "Performance Point" (what a great movie that was!)
      
      Perf. Point is driven out of MOSS (perfect for the whole sharing/caring/collab world that Sharepoint pushes - alerts/presence info etc etc)
      
      It provides intelligence and the ability to forecast/plan/manipulate information from many different sources of which BAM is one. Perfect - you're very own rockect scientist on call.
      
      You business processes is just another area that plugs into this :)
      
   4. Tying it all together in a nutshell.....
      systems - more integration code, less custom code/app silos -> complex solutions comprising of many components -> how to intelligently track/monitor -> BAM -> BAM -> Cube(s), easy, distributable -> Perf Point, MOSS based very easy
      
      If I was a partner and wondering what technology to get into right now.....apart from BizTalk R2 :)..... gotta be Perf. Point -> 18 months time, you won't have enough perf. point people! :)
      
      Enjoy your Friday folks!
      
      

I had a little time this week and thought I'd write a quick stsadm extension to enumerate and set index ranking parameters, when querying MOSS indexes.

My main motivation was so you could change the ranking order of XLS files over PPT files etc.

There seems to be a ancient art in setting these values.

So what's included:

1. an XML file that needs to be copied to the \12\Config folder. Tells stsadm about the new commands and what class to run.




2. A .NET assembly that needs to be GAC-ed so the stsadm doesn't have to look too hard to try and find the class.

Creating an extension is a pretty easy thing - extend an interface as follows:

The next part was to interface with the indexing service as follows:

The keyValues collection are created by stsadm and passed into your method - how good is that.

To get access to the Ranking and SearchContext classes a few additional references are required. Such as:

- Microsoft.Office.Server
- Microsoft.Office.Server.Search
- Microsoft.Sharepoint.Search

These are all in the attached project.

Running the enumindexrankparams looks a little like this:
(these are some secret numbers to do with weightings of 'click depth', 'url depth', language etc. A value of 0 is ignored. I'm still working through what these exactly are - apart from the file type ones)

As I understand you can't add additional weightings here for file types like PDF etc.

the commands to run this are:

1. stsadm -o enumindexrankparams -site <url to ssp>

2. stsadm -o setindexrankparams -site <url to ssp> -<rank name> <rank value>
    stsadm -o setindexrankparams -site <url to ssp> -filetypepriorlistitems 1

Have fun - the project shows you how to extend the stsadm and also start to get a bit of a feel of the Search/Index APIs.

Grab the source here -

What a great event - BizTalk, BizTalk and more Biztalk.

It was great to see all those who attended and especially those from the user groups (Sydney, Brisbane and Melb)

I personally had a great day - the weather was great. It was sunny, it hailed and then in true fashion the sun was out again.

So this means that BizTalk 2006 R2 is now RTM - grab it from here

Scott (another BizTalk super hero) & I put together a great RFID Demo (I can say *great* being not too bias).

Come 2am the morning before the launch Scott & I were wondering 'was there going to be a demo?'. In true show style it all came off on the day :)
I'll blog about the demo shortly....it went down a treat

There were some great sessions (I wasn't able to get to them as I was a 'booth babe' for the day).

The thing that I was most impressed about on the day......was the amount of support from the Corp BizTalk team. Well done guys!!!
The team had been on the road launching R2 in 3 world wide locations (in Taipei they were treated almost like rock star status!).

We had Oliver Sharp (BizTalk PM) and major figures in his team - the guys were great and always willing to lend an ear. (Some of them were off surfing at Bondi the following day - that's the way it's done !! :)

In mentioning the team I can't fail to mention MR. RFID of MS - Anush Kumar. What a great genuine guy. He's always got a brilliant story to tell around Microsoft RFID Services. RFID, Integration, surfacing, WCF, BizTalk, BAM, TagEvent data - these are all words he uses. This is a huge Microsoft story - and what the RFID team has achieved it the last 3-4 years both on the hardware/software space is amazing. Standardising readers (c.f. ODBC and ODBC drivers) and providing momentum to standards bodies on various tags and their formats.

R2 here we come....time to update some VPCs.

The only thing I say is ...... "What am I doing wrong" :)