BizTalk Tips and Muses...

BizTalk is not as sexy as Office (but it is not less attractive) We have been there before. You are meeting a potential customer to promote a BizTalk solution. But what to show them? The mapper ?, the orchestration designer? We can show BizTalk BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) but that is not the BizTalk core functionality and might confuse the customer who already use several BI tools. We all know that BizTalk is a great development platform, it has fantastic system-to-system integration capabilities, but it doesn't have the sexy look with all the bells and whistles like other Microsoft products have. SharePoint has a fancy website, Project has Gantt charts. Even SQL Server has its new reporting wizard and dashboard. BizTalk is harder to sell. We all know its value, and can talk about a proven and efficient development platform. Sitting with IT managers is easier ,but sitting with the business managers and explaining why they need BizTalk without boring them with technical buzzwords - is harder. So I find myself showing our workflow designer, the workflow webforms and tasks, the workflow monitoring gauges and the reports. They love it!. You can see their eyes shine. Then I explain that behind-the-scenes BizTalk's system-to-system integration engine, and our human-to-human workflow platform are running the process. The run-time scenario has an huge impact on the customer's decision on the proposed solution. The customer wants to visually see it work, not get an technological explanation. The customer wants a solution for a business problem, not another technology tool. Showing a visually compelling scenario in a real-live environment (we usually run the scenarios on a VPC) gives credibility to the solution. Using the customer's day-to-day tools (like Outlook..) as a front-end - shows that the solution is simple to use. We use simple business terms that business managers understand: Integration between the company's different systems is managed by the BizTalk platform. The workflow process is managed by PNMsoft's workflow platform. BizTalk is a great product and with the right scenario is also very attractive . I just wish it had a few more "bells and whistles" to show off...

BizTalk Companies vs. "Newbies" During one of the BPM events that I visited lately, I overheard a question being asked to the CEO of one of UK's top BizTalk project companies: What do you think of all the new BizTalk companies popping up lately? The CEO paused for a second and the replied: "Great, we have no problems with the newbies.." "They find new customers, start a project, muck it up and then we are called in.. By then the customer has lowered their expectations, and just finishing the project is a win-win situation for them.. It saves us searching for leads... The more the merrier" Food for thought...

BizTalk Workflow The best combination we find in implementing BizTalk workflow solutions is by using our workflow platform for the human-to-human tasks and using BizTalk for the system-to-system tasks. Example: Opening a new bank account The customer browses to the bank's online website, submits their details and submits a new account request. The workflow system sends a task to the bank's credit department, to initiate an approval cycle. The credit department set a credit limit for the new account. The workflow system runs the customer details through an automated blacklisting check and sends a task to the auditing department to approve the new customer. The workflow system can send the task to an individual, a group or a calculated user based on workload balancing. The workflow system then sends a task to the account manage for the final approval. If approved, the new account details are distributed to the internal bank systems, via BizTalk. The customer is notified of the request status. The workflow system follows up on the process ensuring that the tasks are not delayed by using the SLA and workflow escalation policies.

BizTalk is not workflow BizTalk is a great platform for system-to-system integration. BizTalk has invested an enormous effort in creating and perfecting the integration functionality between systems. BizTalk does have built-in workflow functionality, but that is not BizTalk's main purpose. Real-life organization scenarios have an additional level of human-to-human complexity. We usually get called in to supply the missing functionality. As our workflow platform sits on Windows Workflow Foundation and integrates seamlessly with BizTalk orchestrations and BizTalk's business rule engine, we provide an end-to-end solution that uses BizTalk as the system-to-system component and our workflow platform as the human-to-human component.