The year 2013 promises to be a great year for us BizTalk professionals. BizTalk Server 2013 will be released in a few months, the beta is currently available on-premise and in Windows Azure. A few events have taken place already this month like the BizTalk Summits in London, Amsterdam and Stockholm. There will be more events coming this year. A lot of community involvement in 2013.
Today’s story will be on Torben Chrona Christiansen, a fellow BizTalk professional with a passion for BizTalk Server. Torben lives with his family (a wife, a son at the age of 3 and a son almost 1 year old) in Blovstroed about half an hour drive north of Copenhagen. He has a great interest in photography, loves to take pictures and runs a website about camera gear.
Torben likes to run when he has time for it and each autumn he tries to participate in the Eremitagelobet. He is also a big fan of the soccer team FC Copenhagen (FCK) and if he has the chance he will go to their home games at their stadium in Copenhagen.
Torben works as a consultant at CGI (former Logica) his whole professional career (16 years). During that time he has worked on many different projects. His first job was doing some Excel automation back in 1997.
“Since that time I have had experience with most types of application development from Office development, to multi-layered web and windows application, to business intelligence and enterprise application integration. Today I am an architect, where my main focus is the integration and enterprise architecture, where I advise companies in Denmark with some degree of development of the solutions too. My current projects include a large BizTalk integration project with Salesforce to various other systems and the other major project has a focus on integration strategy with Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and BizTalk Server 2010 as some of the core technologies.”
Torbens BizTalk expertise covers all aspects of a BizTalk solution. He sometimes does the architecture for a solution, is involved in the development of the solution or helps with the administration from the setup to the daily maintenance of already deployed solutions.
“My first BizTalk solution was based on the BizTalk Server 2004 and the base EDI adapter. Since then I have been around a great deal of the technologies that are available in the product. I like working with the BizTalk Server product, but at the same time it is a little bit sad that Microsoft has not made major investments in the product over the last couple of years.”
“There are four major things I would like see in the product. One is to replace the orchestrations with workflow foundation. The develop experience and extension possibility in Workflow Foundation is 10 times better than offered through BizTalk orchestrations. Two is the low latency option in BizTalk. Three is some better adapters for standard Microsoft products like Dynamics CRM, SQL Server, Dynamics AX and more (working with third party products like Scribe and TimeXtender I know it is possible). The fourth and final thing is the pricing. It is just too expensive to get started for a lot of companies.”
A final comment by Torben:
“Thank you for reading my blog. Share, comment and connect that is how we get better as a community. Remember to enjoy your life with the things that make you happy.”
Thanks Torben for your time and contributions to the BizTalk community (MSDN and blog).
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
