Sergio Del Piccolo

Keynote: Microsoft’s Vision for the Next Generation Application Platform
Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President, Connected Systems Division
Don Ferguson, Technical Fellow
Steve Martin, Director, Connected Systems Division

During the keynote speech Robert Wahbe announced Microsoft’s vision, roadmap and next wave of products regarding SOA and the ability to make it available to firms of all sizes, codenamed “Oslo”. For more information see Microsoft’s press release. It comprises of a group of products and services that Microsoft intends to deliver over the next few years. This forms part of the vision of Software + Services that has been a Microsoft focus recently.

As part of reaching the goals set out by “Oslo” Microsoft will be enhancing the current technology available today, focusing on the following five areas:

• Server - Microsoft BizTalk Server “6” will provide a core foundation for distributed and highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions, and deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.
• Services - BizTalk Services “1” will offer a commercially supported release of Web-based services enabling hosted composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. Of note is that this release will include advanced messaging, identity and workflow capabilities.
• Framework - The Microsoft .NET Framework “4” release will further enable model-driven development with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).
• Tools - New technology planned for Visual Studio “10” will make significant strides in end-to-end application life-cycle management through new tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.
• Repository - There will also be investments in aligning the metadata repositories across the Server and Tools product sets. Microsoft System Center “5,” Visual Studio “10” and BizTalk Server “6” will utilize a repository technology for managing, versioning and deploying models.

“Oslo in a nutshell” will comprise of Services which will extended from the client to cloud and hosted by Microsoft, (e.g. www.biztalk.net) and Models and making them a mainstream part of development.

The keynote also delved further into these two concepts.

• Model Driven Development (Models) - Microsoft aims to create new tools and a model that takes models across domains (Business Analysts, Architects, IT Professionals, and Developers).
• Internet Service Bus (Services ) - The services will be hosted on the cloud, allowing for the ability to take small enterprises and allow them to build customizable and simple connected Business Processes. The goal being to make it simple to connect people to applications they need. See the Architecture Journal - Journal 13 for a great article on this topic by Donald Ferguson, Dennis Pilarinos and John Schwchuk.

The final thing that stood out to me was the announcement of a SOA & BP Pack - which is a discounted software package including BizTalk Server 2006 R2, SharePoint Server, Visual Studio Team System and SQL Server 2005. I’m not sure how much this will cost, but it will need to be a reasonable cost if the aim to have firms of all sizes have the ability to deal with Software + Services.

Links:
www.microsoft.com/soa

People_Ready Processes with SP Workflows & Forms Services
Christian Stark, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

This presentation was an introductory level presentation about using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Office 2007. There were a few demos around the way Office products have built-in support for workflows and around creating simple worklfows with Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer. It touched on the following Microsoft products:

• Visio 2007 - the modeling tool, used to design and analyze processes.
• InfoPath 2007 - used to create forms for UI.
• Outlook 2007 - used to receive notifications.
• SharePoint Designer 2007 - used to create/customize simple to intermediate workflows.
• Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Excel 2007 - used to interact with workflows processes.
• Visual Studio 2005 - used to create workflows, extending templates, etc.

Also mentioned was the creation of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance which provides a technological alliance of business process partner, including Ascentn, K2.net, Global 360 and Metastorm. Finally, the final point made was that Microsoft would continue to provide the Business Process platform and that it would be relying on the partners to provide the business (product) solutions required by organizations.

Flexible Governance Infrastructure
Frank Martinez, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy, SOA

Frank presented a great vision of creating a governance infrastructure for SOA in the enterprise. He touched on the main goals of SOA governance to reduce cost through reuse, increase agility to better align IT and the business and to reduce the risk, fragility and complexity of integration by improving interoperability through standards.

He covered the top 5 fallacies regarding SOA governance:

1. We have good IT and application lifecycle governance, thus we have good SOA governance
2. We don’t have an SOA program, thus we don’t need SOA governance
3. We don’t have any services, thus we don’t need SOA governance
4. We already have run-time SOA management capabilities, thus we already have SOA governance
5. We already have an SOA registry/repository, thus we already have SOA governance

He covered a couple of SOA products, viz. Workbench SOA Governance (lifecycle related) and Service Manager SOA Management and Security (operations related).

He ended with the following take away’s

• There is No “one size fits all” governance model
• Effective SOA has to address people, policy, process and technology… in that order
• Governance automating delivers economies of scale …when it supports your governance model and structures
• Early cycle governance model (that is collaborative) can act as an accelerator for enterprise SOA goals and objectives
• Closed-loop policy definition, enforcement, auditing, compliance reporting is a must have for effective governance automation

For more information regarding governance and SOA see The Business Benefits of Shared Services in an SOA by Frank.

Panel Discussion

The final session of the day was a Microsoft panel discussion. The most notable piece of news there for me was that Visual Studio 2008 will ship by the end of this year.

The evening ended with an Ask the Experts Reception and Sponsor Expo where I managed to run into a few partners from K2.Net. It was a full first day for me with more to come tomorrow.

Microsoft, Microsoft SOA Conference, BizTalk, Oslo, Software + Services, Internet Service Bus, Windows Workflow Foundation, WF

This year I will be attending the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference 2007 conference in Redmond again. I went to the conference last year and found it to be informative and a great place to network with some of the Microsoft MVP’s, partners, and customers. I am particularly looking forward to seeing a couple of friends (and ex-colleagues, but I won’t hold that against them) Simon Chester and Jason Shantz present on Healthcare Enterprise Integration: SOA Solutions. For those interested, their presentation will be on Wednesday, October 31st, from 2.30-3.30pm in the Hood room.

Let me know if you will be attending and we can arrange to meet!

Currently many firms using BizTalk Server have a single production environment for all of their BizTalk applications. The security architecture for BizTalk is such that there are a couple of groups, viz. BizTalk Administrators and BizTalk Operators. BizTalk Administrators have complete control over the BizTalk Server Group and can make any configuration change to the environment and to all deployed applications. The BizTalk Operators group has fewer privileges and allows the user to perform troubleshooting and monitoring actions across all deployed applications. For an administrator of a BizTalk application to be able to interact with their application, they must be in either of the aforementioned groups. Recently I had a customer come to me with multiple applications deployed to a single BizTalk environment and a requirement for separate administrators per application. They did not want the application administrators to be able to see or affect other applications that they had not been given rights to. So, I set about creating a web application that shows only the BizTalk applications that the user has been granted access to. The user can stop, start, enable, disable, etc, all application artifacts, and suspend, resume and terminate any messages that form part of those applications. The web site makes use of the ExplorerOM and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) calls.

Layout

While I can’t have the code downloadable as it forms part of the intellectual property of the firm that I work for, I can explain how the web site works. The web site is similar to BizTalk Administration Console in that it has a page for Platform (Platform Settings in the BTS Admin Console), Parties, Applications, and Messages (Group Hub in the BTS Admin Console). I’ve also added a Logs page that displays all event logs. The following diagram shows the Platform page:

None of the Platform settings are configurable as changing them will affect other applications that are dependant on them.

Security

The security for BizTalk application administrators is set in Active Directory. A group is created for each BizTalk application and the user who will be an application administrator is added to the group. The web site associates the groups with the BizTalk applications and if the user is a member of the application group, they can view and interact with the application. The following diagram shows the applications page:

Applications

The applications page lists all application that the user has access to and allows them to stop and start an application. Each application can be drilled into as well and each artifact can be stopped, started, enabled, disabled, etc. These actions are implemented through WMI calls against the BizTalk Management database. An artifact can also be drilled into to show all properties associated with the artifact. The following diagram shows the Send Ports for an application:

Messages

The message page allows the user to view the basic message queries as on the Group Hub page of the BTS Admin Console, and allows them to suspend, resume and terminate messages where applicable. Also added are the built-in HAT (Health and Activity Tracker) queries which are run against the BizTalk Tracking database. Another feature is the ability to drill down into a service instance message and to view some of the properties associated with the message, as shown in the following diagram:

Logs

The logs page allows for all application logs to be viewed. There is also a BTS Admin log that applies to the BizTalk Delegated Admin web site. It shows entries whenever an administrator stops, starts, enables, disables, etc. an artifact or suspends, resumes or terminates a message. The following diagram shows the events for the web application:

The Future

While there is much more that can be done in future releases, it must be expected that Microsoft will extend the security model around the BizTalk Administration Console in a future release of BizTalk Server. In the meantime, firms wanting a more granular security model around their BizTalk applications have no option other than custom code.

Links
Microsoft BizTalk ExplorerOM
Windows Management Instrumentation

BizTalk 2006, BizTalk Delegated Administration, BizTalk Administration, WMI, Windows Management Instrumentation, BizTalk ExplorerOM