Twin Cities Connected Systems User Group Meeting - January 21st, 2010

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If you are in are in Minneapolis on Thursday January 21st please join us for the Twin Cities Connected Systems User Group Meeting.

The meeting takes place at the Microsoft offices at 8300 Norman Center Drive, Bloomington, MN 55437.  This months meeting time has changed and we will be meeting from 5:00 to 6:30

Ed Jones from RBA will be presenting on Implementing a Service Bus Architecture with BizTalk 2009 and the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0: A Real World Example

Here is a write-up of what will be covered:

Although BizTalk Server offers much in terms of flexibility and extensibility through the implementation of Service Oriented Architectures, most BizTalk applications are developed in “hub-and-spoke” models that are tightly coupled to specific points of functionality.  Entire business processes are often represented as orchestration.  As such, when business processes change, orchestrations also need to change, often requiring the reconstruction and redeployment of entire BizTalk solutions.

One way to alleviate this pain is to avoid the use of a “hub-and-spoke” model altogether in favor of a Service Bus approach.  The BizTalk ESB Toolkit helps accomplish this by making the creation of a true Service Bus easier.  One feature of the toolkit for example, itineraries, allows us to create capabilities that are independent of each other and independent of specific processes.  This "Composition of Capabilities" method is preferred over the point-to-point solutions used in many BizTalk applications enabling more extensible and flexible Business Processes.

Our client required a system that would accept incoming shipment data in the form of flat-files in multiple formats, process that data through a series of resolutions, and then output the data in both its raw and processed form into an ERP system.  Some data will be processed, while other data will be ignored.  Over time it is expected that the various processes may change in size, scope, and sequential order.  Our solution implements ESB Toolkit Itineraries to accomplish this composition of capabilities.  We also use the Exception Management and other more traditional BizTalk functionalities such as Business Rules.