Talking the language of business
July 9 - Kay Ewbank talks to James Utzschneider, the man responsible for designing
Microsoft's industry frameworks for retail, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare
and distribution.
Kay: BizTalk is getting lots of coverage at TechEd, with rave reviews in the
keynotes and very popular sessions. What's the message you want developers to take away?
James: BizTalk is a fun project to be working on, for several reasons. Firstly,
it's a message that resonates easily with customers, including non-programmers. It's a
timely convergence of an incredibly important market requirement - trying to tie these
systems together with a relatively accessible standard technology. A lot of the work that
Microsoft did over the last two years with XML, and in the previous five or six years on
frameworks, puts us at a relative advantage. We're able to use this right now with
customers.
Kay: How many customers are moving over to it already?
James: It's happening in waves. There's astonishing velocity in this market.
It's the easiest app to justify, they're pretty easy to set up, and it is a well defined
payback. From that, people are saying "Let's do a pilot, see how we can apply the
standard in other areas".
Kay: From a developer's viewpoint, what would be the one key idea you would like
them to take away?
James: When integrating applications together, treat them as separate
applications that just exchange well-defined messages between each other, as opposed to
trying to integrate two applications to become one application.
Kay: XML is a great tool to use if you know your way around the data, but you
still need a degree of knowledge and skill to work your way around the data.
James: Absolutely, and this is where tools will become quite important. We're
working on tools right now, where you point the tool at a database schema, and it produces
an XML implementation of the schema. Point the tool at a form, and it produces an XML
document that maps to the fields in the form.
Kay: Presumably they'll fit with Office at some point in the future?
James: Yes.
Kay: Do products such as Babylon provide an alternative?
James: No, they're still necessary. One of the things that BizTalk isn't going
to solve is that you can have these nice XML documents that go back and forth, but there's
a gazinter and a gazouter in every system, and that's still going to be hard - you need to
figure out a way to get XML into a format that the applications understand.
Apps act like medieval fiefdoms with lots of defences and,
if you're not from that fiefdom, you won't be allowed in. If someone wants access to the
data tables within your app, you don't necessarily want to give them access. XML and
BizTalk are like a treaty, where you can say what information you're going to allow in,
and what the response will be to that information or request. Behind the walls of the
fiefdom, it doesn't matter how things work, what they do with the data, as long as you get
the correct response.
Kay: XML is such a useful technology, it's bound to start developing, people are
going to want to put more things in there. What's the Microsoft position on this?
James: The X, in XML, stands for eXtensible. It's designed to have people throw
things into it. That's the beauty of it.
Kay: Are there points that you'd like to get across before we finish?
James: I do want to make sure that we're not overhyping it, and not making out
that it's pixie fairy dots. It's a W3C protocol for representing data - nothing more,
nothing less. Our tools support for it is OK. It's going to get much better. Even given
the relatively poor state of tools today, it's use in some environments, the velocity of
its adoption, is just mind boggling.
The next stage for developers should be to learn it; do a
small pilot, learn what works with the technology. There are samples here at Tech Ed, and
conference attendees will be able to use the toolkit. They will also be going out to MSDN
subscribers, so get your teeth into it, because there are going to be great opportunities.
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