When Skövde Municipality’s software developer, Magnus Olofsson, decided to step away from Microsoft BizTalk after years of tangled workflows and mounting technical debt, he found the opportunity to bring innovation into his team of seven developers providing support to the municipality right in the middle of Sweden’s two largest lakes and its neighboring cities.
The experience, he says, was nothing short of liberating. Olofsson shared his learnings during the webinar “Migrating from BizTalk in 6 months: Here's how they did it”, livestreamed on June 17 and now available on-demand.
The project started when Olofsson and the team began to reassess how they worked with development, a process sparked by another migration. “It was a pretty large project: migrating the financial management system for nine municipalities. Since the financial management system is so central, it impacted a lot of other systems as well,” he said.
The solution came with a low-code, Microsoft‑friendly iPaaS that allowed them to sketch the project and migrate complex integrations in just six months — on time, on budget, and without disruptions.
"When we got the Frends platform and saw what it could do for us, we wanted to take full advantage of the low-code possibilities and visualizing integration processes."
Magnus Olofsson, software developer, Skövde Municipality
Despite handling “roughly 200 some odd integrations” in their BizTalk 2016 environment, Olofsson emphasized that migration doesn’t mean throwing everything out:
“You could take full advantage of the C# code that you already have. You could probably use most of the artifacts in a good way,” explained the developer.
Still, his team made a conscious decision not to copy everything one-to-one.
“We wanted to enable everyone to understand or even be able to create their own integrations,” he said. “If we don't need to use code, we don't.”
Frends’ visual tooling and low-code orchestration were key reasons the team embraced this fresh approach — not only for development efficiency, but to improve documentation, troubleshooting, and ultimately, make integration more understandable even to non-technical stakeholders.
With BizTalk mainstream support ending in April 2028, companies will have to take their processes elsewhere. And, as every IT leader is well aware, delays could lead to mounting security risks, outdated tooling and rising costs
Olofsson cautioned others against waiting too long: “2028 might seem far away, but things have a tendency to take a lot of calendar time—even if it’s not technically difficult.”
He noted dramatic improvements post-migration. “The greatest benefit I have felt—and I think all the team has felt—is a lot shorter time to market. We can go very quickly today from an idea to a prototype, to a deployed integration solution. Or sometimes go quickly from an idea to scrapping it, because it was a bad idea. But we can move swiftly.”
These improvements, he added, weren’t just about speed. They also positively impacted team morale and reduced the need to hire external consultants, like he did with BizTalk: “The platform lets us utilize the different skill sets among us developers… It lets us utilize all those skills in a better way.”
"Now, we don’t usually need to wait for any external help. We can solve things ourselves, when we need it.”
Magnus Olofsson, software developer, Skövde Municipality