Teched Australia 2006 Recap - Building Enterprise Class BTS solutions

I thought I’d take some time to capture some of my thoughts for each of the sessions I was lucky enough to be involved in this year.

The first session we ran was one called Building Enterprise Class BizTalk Server Solutions. When we did the original planning for this session, we thought it would be important to try to get across to the audience many of the thoughts and ideas of what you need to consider when you build BizTalk solutions. I tried to take the approach of presenting top down – i.e. getting some insight into thoughts and experiences around architecture, SDLC, development/design, performance and other general considerations that go into the dialog we have with customers around building these solutions.

I thought, hey what a great opportunity to get some of the most switched on and experienced BTS people in the field to present this so we got Bill Chesnut, Mick Badran, Graham Elliot, Dave Lemphers and myself to present. Collectively, there was over 20 years BTS experience between us. The idea was we would present 5–7 minutes on thoughts (1 topic each) and then we would open the floor for 1/2 hour so that the audience could as plenty of questions.

We had about 200 people in this session, and 24 of you posted final evaluations. Thanks for doing that. I certainly got some very interesting feedback that I can use to shape future presentations. Like most of these types of sessions, I got some overwhelming positive feedback but some negative feedback as well. Essentially many of you (that posted evaluations) felt that the 5 presenter approach didn’t quite work. You felt it lacked some focus. You felt that it was too little time for each person to present. Many felt that the 10 minute introduction at the start of the sessions (introducing the presenters and the broad usage scenarios) was time that could have been used better… that’s OK, I’ll address that for next time.

On the postive side, most of you felt that the presenters knowledge was great, but still wanted more time and detail in certain presentation areas. Some of you felt the presentation was very informative and useful, and wished other sessions had been similar to this (i.e. informal and open). Essentially the feedback scores ended up being for this session:

Overall Results

So evaluation feedback aside, here is my personal feedback: I thoroughly enjoyed the session! If you attended and did not leave feedback, please feel free to here on my blog :-) To be honest, I was somewhat shocked to see that most of the audience had been doing BizTalk / done BizTalk but many of you had not come across Host / Host Instances and Host Resource Utilisation. One of the main things we tried to impart was the importance of understanding the BTS architecture! The other was BAM. Hardly anyone is taking advantage of BAM! It will be the best 4 hours of development time you will spend, and the business will thank you for it. Anyway, one of the things I promised is I would leave some documents for you. So I’ve just created a site with anon access and I’ll load the whitepapers and presentation to the site by close of business Monday 29th August. Check it all out here: https://cjv.officeisp.net/biztalk/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Please feel free to email any of us if you have any queries!

Thanks to Bill, Mick, Graham and Dave for helping out with this sessions, and for all of you that took your *personal* valuable time to attend our session. I do really appreciate your feedback, and will make sure that its used to improve not only next years sessions, but every BTS session we do.