A fine double act

Session 19
Implementing the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) using Microsoft BizTalk Server

There have been a number of fine double acts over the years, Cannon & Ball, Little & Large, Cheese & Onion and Mike & Bernie Winters, but to name a few and todays partnership proved no exception. Robert Hogg (Chief BizTalk Architect of Black Marble) and Ewan Faiweather (a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft UK) managed to make a heavy topic area really quite entertaining.

How many of you have heard of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) let alone wondered how it could benefit your business? ESB is a widely used term in the Enterprise industry but poorly understood.

The speakers introduced a number of key concepts needed to understand ESB and examined ESB can improve business. This was consolidated with a number of demonstrations.

We next dived into BizTalk which is a Microsoft sponsored set of guidelines for how to publish schemas in XML and how to use XML messages to easily integrate software programs together in order to build rich new solutions.

Further demonstrations showed how BizTalk can be used to implement ESB.

Although a number of the topics discussed during this session were very new to me, I tried to glean what I could.