System Center Operations Manager is one of the popular monitoring tools for monitoring IT infrastructures (including BizTalk Server). Since there are so many IT-organizations using this product I wanted to give you a heads-up that the mainstream support for SCOM 2007 ends on the 10th of July 2012. If you have SCOM 2007 R2 your good for another two years till the 8th of July 2014.

For more information see:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/bb497976

Imagine that you are looking for a BizTalk admin, and somehow, magically your recruiter found some great resumes and set you up with some interviews. What questions are you going to ask to get a good feeling about the candidates technical knowledge? Tord Glad Nordahl did some great work about that:

http://biztalkadmin.com/biztalk-administrator-interview-questions/

Ohhh, and p.s., if you are a BizTalk admin who lives in The Netherlands and you know all of these answers, or know a BizTalk admin like that, please let me know (jeroen AT BizTalkAdminsBlogging dot com). I can set you up with an great job opportunity (interesting work, nice colleagues and an excellent salary). :)

One of my clients asked for an easier way to stop and start BizTalk applications. I created a PowerShell script with a Windows forms GUI. You can use it to stop or start all host instances and or IIS on a server in a BizTalk group.

The MessageBoxViewer MBV is one of the main tools we have at hand to manage and monitor our BizTalk environments. This tool has been created by Jean-Pierre Auconie, and is currently available in version 11.

I recently saw a presentation from Saravana Kumar about BizTalk360. He showed the product and some of the new functionalities. This presentation inspired me to do some testing with BizTalk360 and write a blogpost about it.

Below statement is off course not suitable for all companies and how they work, but in my company we separate developing and operation and this is the background why I wrote this article.

To gain more quality in delivery to customers, I think the BizTalk operation team should have a Software Development Kit (SDK) so the developers that create code and deliver application package and bindings to BizTalk operation must understand the infrastructure part of the delivery, often i see that developers focus is to handle functions but forget that it should run in a complex infrastructure.

As most of you will know BizTalk messages and context are stored in the MessageBox and the Tracking database as Image types. By several people a number of posts have been written about decompressing BizTalk messages and their context and here's another one!

When we had an incident with quite some suspended (not resumable) instances, we needed to retrieve message content and context. This information should be used to take appropriate actions for damage elimination.

After a search I found this great article from Thiago Almeida. It even contains a sample solution! Good news though for an intermediate developer as me!
I've been working on the solution and made it use just the SQL method. My goal was to create functions in C#, that would decompress the fields that contains the message and the context and enable the user to use these functions in SQL queries they entered in a textbox.

I regularly advise my clients about the latest service packs and cumulative update packages. Since all my clients are running different versions of BizTalk Server I often have to look this information up. Sandro Pereira experiences the same problem, so he created an overview of all the available service packs and cumulative update packages on his blog:

http://sandroaspbiztalkblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/biztalk-server-list-of-service-packs-and-cumulative-updates-available/

Something to keep in your bookmarks!

What is the Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 (MOF)

The Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 (MOF) consists of integrated Best Practices, Principles, and Activities that provide comprehensive guidelines for achieving reliability for IT solutions and services. MOF provides question-based guidance that allows us to determine what is needed for our organization now, as well as activities that will keep our IT organization running efficiently and effectively in the future.

The guidance in the Microsoft Operations Framework encompasses all of the activities and processes involved in managing an IT services; its conception, development, operation, maintenance, and—ultimately—its retirement.