SOA & BP Conference - Part 3: BAM, BAM, BAM

Jon Flanders did a session (sold out)  last night on building a Service Monitoring Infrastructure with BAM. Great talk! He highlighted one thing that has been drifting on the edge of my consciousness  over the past year; that is where is the sweet spot for BAM and where does the BizTalk tracking database play well.

After BAM was released in BizTalk 2004 it became obvious to M$ that the BAM product had as much traction with the operational people as it did as it did on the business side. The first signs of this were the embedding of BAM functionality with the M$ Operations Manager (MOM 2005 Resource Kit). The most recent evidence is that the new EDI functionality is supported from a tracking perspective by BAM. I felt compelled to ask the question then as to what to choose

• BAM and Tracking

or

• Just BAM

The answer yesterday was BAM only. I'm still weighing the implications of this. Ponder for a second what happens when you turn off all tracking in BizTalk. BizTalk would scream along enabling support for lower (not low-low) latency solutions, the downside seem all related to compliance and auditing.  Now the questions is how to address these gaps with BAM.

My gut feel is that Jon is onto something here. Because BAM extends the reach of how we implement tracking in a really flexible way the power to track what's interesting to your business moves back into your control. BAM really provides a more holistic approach that reflects the reality of tracking.

IMTC BizTalk 2006 R2 and BizTalk RFID

As I mentioned I'm speaking at the IMTC. Here's a little taster of what the demo will cover. I'm probably being way to ambitious in what I want to cover but here are the major points

• BizTalk R2 What's new?
• WCF Adapters
• BizTalk RFID
• BAM Interceptors
• R2 Adapter Framework (time permitted)

I've got just over an hour so it's going to be interesting fitting all that in. I decided not to do the usual order processing demo in an effort to try and get people a bit more engaged (I hope ;0). You can read the synopsis here.

Basically I'm fascinated by the potential that RFID has as a ubiquitous technology. Every other dmeo I've seen in this area is always in the context of inventory management, tracking and stock control. In a way my demo is much the same apart from the setting. I've moved off the shop floor and into Law Enforcement.

The various CSI shows on the idiot box inspired me with their use of technology (I hate the show especially CSI Miami, Horatio Kane in particular). Having said all that I love the technology (real or not).

To cut a long story short the demo will show a CSI Evidence Monitoring system with real live RFID devices as opposed to the AcmeProvider in the RFID SDK. When I'm done I'll post the code and a step by step of how to recreate the whole solution.