Back in the Fall of 2008 at Professional Developers Conference (PDC) Microsoft published for the first time their Azure cloud computing concept. During the present year Azure has been commercially available and Microsoft announced in their biggest conference of the year (Worldwide Partner Conference, WPC) that they are "All-In" with...
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A day back our Customer initiated a change to their integration solution. Based on our and Customer's documentation the solution was a simple batch file transfer using SFTPS for transportation and XSLT for data transformation. Our developer was lost for a while when the solution in production turned out to be two web service calls...
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When talking about integration sometimes people are discussing totally contrary aspects even though they are using same words. Depending on the experience, background or context same terms might mean various things to different people. I wanted to write about how I see the dimensions in the enterprise integration space; this is just...
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What is the contingency plan of the integration platform formed of? The integration platform can crash due to a failure in a system component – a hardware failure in a computer, or a software failure in Windows Server, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, or FRENDS Iron, for example. Based on Contingency Planning Guide for Information...
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Over the years spent in systems integration and business process automation we have experienced and encountered a number of varying project models. I'll give a brief overview about some of the most intriguing project models used in the integration business.   Totally wasted - model. This one's really simple. Requirements are being...
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“Can it be so hard?!?”, asked a Customer with frustrated tone. This question was about a problem in a simple integration interface that received product catalogs from separate suppliers, transformed them and loaded them into ERP -system.  Suddenly the receiving interface rejected incoming catalogs from certain suppliers due to a...
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I'll take a small sidestep from the default architectural posts and blog about our new announcement. Our team is proud to release new version of FRENDS Helium - BizTalk Server monitoring tool. Previous tutorial for Helium is still valid but we added some new features to release. Overall Helium purpose is same as earlier versions - to...
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Should you plan for future? Integration platforms and different architectural patterns - service oriented, event driven or enterprise service buses - get a lot of discussion all around the world. And of course a good architecture, its proper implementation and governance issues are the first priority. Without functioning line of...
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Test-driven development (TDD) is one of the best ways to ensure quality of integration development. The idea is to first create automated test cases. The first test round should fail. This failure occurs because the developer has not yet implemented the integration solution that leads to success and ensures that test cases work...
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There's a lot of discussion about tokenization. To keep the issue simple  tokenization is about encrypting sensitive data to reduce PCI compliancy requirements - also there's discussion whether it actually solves anything or not. As already mentioned the key point of tokenization is reducing PCI compliance costs but there are also...
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