This year I architected, designed, developed and supported (still do actually) an enterprise BizTalk solution. It involves integration between eBusiness Suite from Oracle an ERP product for in this case Human Resource Management, Logistics, and Financials and Corporate SharePoint Portal. Applications inside this portal need data from Oracle eBusiness Apps. This data for this case was employee data. Data like name, employee number, and supervisor and so on. Inside the employee portal application a search could be done given a set of parameters like last name and so. Result of the search could be nothing, or employee no longer employed or employee details like which unit, location, name, employee number, phone, email etcetera (contact details). Picture below gives an overview of how data is extracted from Oracle eBusiness to Corporate Portal.
A message to be picked by a BizTalk process is scheduled (A). This message results in a request for employee data from Oracle (B). In a previous post I explained how to set this up. Result messages holding employee records, if there are any, are split up in single messages containing one employee each (C). Splitter pattern is easy to implement in BizTalk using pipeline component for instance or through map/orchestration. Each individual message is then used to be enriched by data from Active Directory like email address, not available inside Oracle (D). Reason email address data is not inside Oracle eBusiness HRM is that this is a leading cooperate application, where employees are updated of created and then later in the process their AD account, email and so on is setup. AD details are not synchronized back in any way to this application. When data is enriched a message containing it is send to last process to create or update xml profiles used inside portal application (E). This done by calling a web service to provide profile based on unique parameter like employee number, if not present a new profile will be created. If profile is not new its data is updated. Updated or new profile is presented back to a web service that will update xml profile files or create a new one.
Next year this case will be hopefully published inside a Dutch software magazine. This year I successfully published an article inside .NET Magazine, a Dutch Magazine published by Microsoft. I enjoy writing and so far I have done a lot of blog posts and some articles. Cheers!!!
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BizTalk Server 2006
