Ricardo Torre

Once your BizTalk solutions are developed and taken to production, you begin supporting them and operating them on a day-to-day basis. At this point, your support staff experiences various challenges on an ongoing basis.

The standard tools, like the BizTalk Administration Console, are not designed or appropriate for ongoing support and operational activities. For example, the console lacks a lot of basic functionality such as basic user access and keeping an audit trail of activities performed by support staff. In some cases, the standard BizTalk console is way too powerful to hand over to inexperienced or non-BizTalk people.

The other challenge is on the BizTalk monitoring side; once your BizTalk solutions are deployed to a production environment, it's important to keep an eye on their health. For example, you need to get notified if a receiving location or host is down. Currently, BizTalk customers need to rely on external tools like the Microsoft System Center Operations (SCOM) or HP Operations Manager (HPOM). SCOM has a good management pack for monitoring the BizTalk server, but the complexity of setting up SCOM and ongoing management of alerts become more and more challenging as your BizTalk applications grow.

I developed the integration of two micro front ends in Dynamics CRM to bring the enhanced AI-based functionality developed by the customer into their opportunity management user interface. One of the front ends was adapted to work inside Dynamics CRM using Iframes and SSO with SAML security. The second was developed from the ground up, using Angular to implement a subset of the back-end functionality, matching Dynamics CRM look and feel.

A portal for partners to remotely manage customers, using an Azure-hosted version of the product. For this cloud transformation project, I architected and designed the APIs to publish customer entities into a hosted Azure service using Azure Service Bus Relay, and I performed a lift and shift to the cloud by running the product in Azure Virtual Machines.

This was later followed with an improvement project to use cloud native capabilities; for example, using Azure App Service to host the web-based components and Azure SQL Database to host critical application data segregated by customer and partner inside an Azure SQL Database elastic pool to mitigate cost concerns.