RFID Presentation at MICSUG, Reston VA

This week I presented on Microsoft BizTalk RFID at the MICSUG (Microsoft Integration and Connected Systems User Group) for the Washington, DC area. The presentation was held at the Microsoft office in Reston.

The main topics that were addressed were architecture of the RFID code base, RFID as a platform, and case studies which demonstrated significant ROI’s. In addition we discussed how RFID and BizTalk work together.

RFID demonstrates a big step forward in BizTalk Server’s capabilities because it now enables connectivity to actual devices rather than software to software transactions which are traditional means of using BizTalk. It’s a brand new paradigm and the audience sensed the shift as the realization that almost any device can be tied into an enterprise using BizTalk.

Exciting times.

Link to BizTalk case studies

Often times I am asked for reference case studies for potential BizTalk projects. And then comes that moment when I can't find the link to them!

Well, here it is. This part of the Microsoft.com site contains over 200 case studies related to BizTalk and has been updated with many new cases related to BizTalk 2006.

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/search.aspx?ProTaxID=1265

HIPAA Support in BizTalk 2006 R2

HIPAA support in BizTalk has always required the purchase, installation and use of the HIPAA accelerator. I've recently learned that the upcoming release of BizTalk 2006 R2 (scheduled sometime in the June 2007 timeframe) will bundle HIPAA support out of box. A main feature of BizTalk 2006 R2 is to provide native EDI support for transaction sets such as X12. HIPAA is simply a collection of specific X12 transaction sets. As such, its a natural enhancement to support HIPAA out of the box. The following is the current list of transaction sets to be supported as described in the Biztalk b2b blog on msdn located at: (http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkb2b/archive/2006/12/31/hipaa-support-in-biztalk-server-2006-r2.aspx).

• key HIPAA 4010A transaction set schemas:
  - 270/271 - Eligibility
  - 276/277 - Claim Status
  - 278 - Services Review Request/Response
  - 820 - Payroll Deduction
  - 834 - Benefit Enrollment
  - 835 - Claim Payment
  - 837D - Claim Dental
  - 837I - Claim Institutional
  - 837P - Claim Professional
• ten other non-HIPAA standard schemas that are widely used in the HIPAA realm, including but not limited to:
  - v3070 277 Healthcare Payer Unsolicited Claim Status
  - v4010 148 Doctor's First Report of Injury
  - v4040 277 Healthcare Claim Acknowledgement
  - v4050 274 Healthcare Provider Information
• a schema annotation which enables splitting a multiple part document (e.g. a 837 Claim that has many individual claims) into separate transactions, one for each individual document. This feature is enabled by an annotation called 'subdocument_break'. When assigned a value of "yes" it will split an inbound transaction into individual transaction sets based on the number of documents included in the original transaction set. For example, an inbound 837D with three separate claims in it would be split into three separate 837D transaction sets with all of the appropriate header information included in each.
• WEDI/SNIP level 2 validation which includes basic X12 syntax integrity as well as validation of loops, segments, elements and code values.

Microsoft introduces an ESB for BizTalk

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) will be available for BizTalk around the time of the release of R2.

An ESB, a collection of architectural patterns based on traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) principles, is an often developed solution with BizTalk. Now, a set of ESB related building blocks will be made available to speed up the design and development process.

Officially called ESB Guidance, the new package contains architectural guidance, patterns and practices, and BizTalk Server and .NET components. Microsoft ESB Guidance currently consists of a number of BizTalk projects including:

ESB Core Engine (transformation and routing agents)
ESB Core Services (dynamic transformation, dynamic endpoint resolution/UDDI)
ESB Portal framework
Exception Management framework
ESB Client application
Namespace Resolution pipeline component

Currently, select partners, customers building an ESB and Microsoft employees can download and try the new early access release. The release contains:

ESB Developer Guide
This document introduces architects and developers to ESB architectural concepts as addressed by the guidance, describes the installation procedures for the reference implementation, and explains the functionality of the guidance components through a set of commonly accepted ESB use cases.

ESB Reference Implementation VPC
This Virtual PC image provides a fully functional instance of the ESB Reference Implementation for evaluation, technical readiness, proof of concept, and demo purposes. The MQSeries 5.3 Trial edition and CSD12 can be installed optionally. The installation for these can be found at the root of C:\Projects within the VPC. Once you install MQSeries, then you can install the JMS Pipeline component MSI package within the VPC.

ESB Reference Implementation Redistributable
The redistributable contains installation scripts and .MSI installers for the ESB Reference Implementation components.

ESB Positioning Presentation
This presentation describes Microsoft’s platform value to customers evaluating ESB vendor offerings and the capabilities offered by the Application Platform and the ESB Guidance package.

ESB Patterns Technical Presentation
This presentation provides an introduction to ESB patterns and capabilities as implemented in the ESB Guidance package.

Microsoft ESB Guidance should be released in the 3rd quarter of 2007.

SOA: not just a buzzword

Over the last couple of years while the concept of Service Oriented Architecture has evolved I often worried that it would just become another buzzword that would become serially dismissed after a few years in the spotlight.

An interesting article popped up on ZDNet earlier this week which proves there is benefit to be had by adopting the principles associated with SOA. Big hitters like Ebay, HP, and Amazon are all adopting the principles of service orientation and in the process cutting costs and streamlining their enterprises. For an interesting read, check out the full article:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=781

BizTalk Tips and Tricks – Promoting properties from a collection.

Only non-repeatable fields can be easily promoted from within the schema editor. At the end of the day however it’s simply an xpath statement. In rare cases, if you need to promote a repeatable field from a collection, you can simply modify the xpath contained within the schema and change the xpath to point to a specific index within the collection. Internally, BizTalk simply applies the xpath to the message when its time to promote the data. There is no reason why the xpath couldn’t be restructured to evaluate to a field within a collection at a given index (such as 0). The need might be rare, but it can be done if needed.

BizTalk Best Practice - Message Decoupling in Orchestrations

Have you ever found it annoying to change message schema types in an orchestration when the orchestration designer forces you to disconnect or unwire all the shapes that reference the message? There is a clever way around this and in the end, it promotes good design and adds another layer of decoupling and indirection to your messages in orchestrations.

Define all of your Messages in an orchestration from Multipart Schema Types.

If you create a message from a schema and assign it to a receive shape and that receive shape is connected to a logical port, if you need to change that message type, you need to first disconnect the “wire” between the receive shape and the port before the designer allows you the change the message type. Imagine if the message was referenced by lots ports and shapes. You would need to disconnect all of them and that could be a real pain.

If on the other hand you create a multipart message type for each schema and create each message in the orchestration from the appropriate multipart message type, you don’t need to unwire the various references to the message if you need to change the underlying schema type of a message. This might not be directly obvious, adds an abstraction layer around your message types and enhances overall maintainability.

BizTalk 2006 – Deep Technical Training

I’m attending an internal BizTalk 2006 deep dive training session given by one of the BizTalk product team members at Microsoft who is close to the product internals and has lots of practical knowledge. It’s being held for both Microsoft and Virtual Technical Specialists. It’s not your typical deep dive and focuses heavily on architecture, farms, high availability, best practices, tuning, internals, considerations when designing solutions, and more. It’s been a long, but very cool week so far.

As time permits, I’ll begin posting interesting things we’ve discussed along the way. You might not come across anything new, but if you do, great! Most are common sense and good engineering practices; however others could be things you simply haven’t thought about yet or practices you haven’t followed. Given the flexibility and breadth of the product there are always going to be new things to consider.

BizTalk Server 2006 Documentation Update

Microsoft released an update to the BizTalk Server 2006 documentation on 10/10/2006. It can be found here BizTalk 2006 Documentation Update (41.6 MB)

Overview
In this Help Update, you'll find the following content:

• Complete documentation for all BizTalk Server Line of Business Adapters, including new tutorials, one for each adapter. See the section "Using Adapters."



• Troubleshooting guidance for each of the native BizTalk adapters. See the section "Troubleshooting Adapters."



• Troubleshooting Instructions for how to capture a memory dump. See the section "How to Capture a Memory Dump of a BizTalk Process."



• Disaster recovery instructions for backing up and restoring your BizTalk Server and databases. See the section "Backing Up and Restoring BizTalk Server"



• Updated Tutorials. See the section, "BizTalk Server 2006 Tutorials"



• Information for improving fault tolerance. See the section "Planning and Architecture"



• Updated Developer's Reference that now includes the BAM namespaces that were not included in the RTM documentation. See the section "Developer's Reference"

BizTalk 2006 R2 B2B/EDI WebLog

The Microsoft BizTalk Product Development team is launching the B2B/EDI WeBlog on the MSDN platform to communicate feature/functionality relating to EDI, AS2 and HIPAA in BizTalk Server 20006 R2. Key objective of the blog is to increase product awareness and also assist with partner readiness thereby leading to a successful launch of the EDI Technology in R2.

The blog can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/BizTalkB2B/