I came across this post from Zach Jason who is a Program Manager within Microsoft highlighting some of the feature investments for BAM in BizTalk 2006. This is quite a good heads up for anyone wishing to know what is new for BAM in BizTalk 2006.
I haven't had as much time as I wish to play around with BAM in 2006 yet, but it is easy to see that Microsoft have certainly invested time and effort into smoothing out some of the rough edges of this BizTalk functionality. I particularly like some of the integration aspects with SharePoint out of the box, rather than simply the Excel spreadsheet add-in. The idea of a BAM information portal certainly seems an obvious direction to follow and one that has been requiring custom development in BizTalk 2004. My only gripe so far would be that trying to integrate some of these Microsoft technologies is not quite as seemless and trouble fee as it should be.
Out of the box BAM Portal and business alerting experience
The BAM portal is an out of the box business user experience where the business user can monitor and interact with their business processes which includes empowering the business end user to create business alerts. The three basic function points that are provided in the portal include:
- The ability to proactively create business alerts at the aggregate level (e.g. notify me if the average duration of an order to be evaluated takes longer then 1 hour) as well as at the instance level (e.g. notify me if any order that is from customerA over $5000 from Dallas)
- Querying on specific instances of an Activity (e.g. Give me orders that have been received from customerA and are over $1000)Viewing key performance indicators of a business activity (e.g. see the time on average that is takes for orders to be fulfilled) The BAM portal is a set of ASP.NET pages that have the look and feel of a Windows Sharepoint Server site but do not have a hard technical dependency on WSS.
Native messaging support via the Tracking Profile Editor
There is no longer a need to write code to the BAM API's within custom pipelines like in BTS 04. It is a simple drag and drop experience from payload schemas inside the TPE tool just like the support for Orchestrations in BTS 04. A couple of other features worth mentioning here include:
- Ability to map context and message properties as well to the BAM activity.
- Supports mapping datetime fields from the payload itself to business milestones that are part of the activity.
Smooth Handoff from Business User to IT Admin (BAM-HAT integration)
Another key feature added as part of the BAM portal experience is the ability for a business end user to ask the IT admin for technical assistance without ever picking up the phone.
For example if the business end user can't see a related PO document for the order management activity he/she can then submit a "trouble ticket". This action results in BAM automatically collecting all of the pipeline and/or orchestration instances that have been touched by the order activity and inserts a single entry into the event log. The IT Admin can have an alert set up via MOM looking for these entries in the event log which will include the link to the specific message flow. Once the MOM alert is fired the IT Admin can go view the alert and click on the link which will launch the HAT message flow tool empowering him/her to debug the issue.
Distributed Navigation
This feature ensures that the business users can navigate seamlessly to different activities regardless if they physically exist on separate BAM stores This allows organizations to have their own control of a BAM database without having to agree on a single location. Of course this can also allow customers to get better performance from their BAM databases by giving the ability to have activities exist in a distributed environment.
Visually define BAM activity
The business analyst can now visually define a BAM activity using the Orchestration Designer for Business Analyst tool (Visio extension). This gives the BA an easy way to identify key business milestones and data of interest. At this point the BA can then export the BAM activity from ODBA and then import the same BAM activity into Excel (using the BAM add in).
The BA can then complete the creation of a customized BAM view in Excel which includes the business Key Performance Indicators desired for the particular scenario.
Multiple BizTalk Server groups pointing to a single BAM DB
The ability for BAM activities to span multiple BizTalk groups is supported in BTS 06. For example some customer scenarios require multiple groups to meet performance goals but still would like this in the context of a single BAM activity.