Most of you are familiar with the interview series by Richard Seroter. Based on this concept I want to start with a series of blog posts, in which I would like to introduce active BizTalk community members. Contrary to the interview series the focus here will be solely on BizTalk Server. It will bring several active BizTalk community members to the foreground.
The first person from the BizTalk community I like to introduce is Tord Glad Nordahl, an active community personality with a strong BizTalk administrative background. He has been active on forums and TechNet Wiki for the last couple of months. I had a chat with him on his background, what kept him busy in real-life, what sports he enjoys practicing and/or watching and what he would like to say to the BizTalk community.
Tord is 25 years old, has a beautiful wife Alfa, and has a lovely daughter Maribell who is nearly two years old. In June they are expecting their second child. The family lives in the rainy city of Bergen in Norway. He works as a BizTalk Administrator Expert for Bouvet ASA, and is stationed in Stavanger working for Statoil 4 days a week.
He likes to call himself a BizTalk advisor, or as he states a BizTalk Administrator Expert. He doesn’t like developing BizTalk solutions but instead focuses more on the environment itself. In his day to day job he is busy with performance optimizations, health checks, monitoring and reviewing applications and solutions. This to ensure that all the processes run according to Microsoft‘s best practices. His job is to make sure that the customer will get all the benefits of BizTalk as an integration platform.
In his spare time he likes to spend as much time as possible with his family. Besides that, he roams around blogs, writes blog posts and TechNet Wiki articles, and contributes to the BizTalk forums and to the local and international BizTalk community in any way he can. He likes to do research on BizTalk using his infrastructure at home. He has four servers running a BizTalk 2010 environment (2 BizTalk clusters and 2 SQL servers clustered) enabling him to experiment with different scenario’s. He then shares his findings on his blog. Besides being a respected BizTalk professional, he also happens to be very handy, doing all kinds of work around the house, much to his wife’s liking. Jobs like building brick walls, removing doors or do some flooring, are no problem. Tord loves soccer and supports his home team “Brann“. Unfortunately, he himself can no longer practice soccer due to a knee injury. Therefore he switched to cycling these days.
Tord would like to thank people for reading his blog posts, and he is grateful for the opportunity to learn more about BizTalk through the community and research. He recommends all of you to go into the TechNet Wiki and to contribute and participate in the Forums. Being active in the community and contributing to the community will make it grow bigger and better. And as he likes to state:
“Be proud of who you are, and don’t be afraid to speak your mind”.
And in Norwegian he finished of our chat with a “Tusen takk Steef-Jan” (Thank you) for all your contributions to the community and for taking time to chat with me. It’s been a pleasure.
I like to thank Tord for his time and am looking forward to meeting him during the BizTalk innovation event at my company 1st of February.