Many of my fellow Integration MVP’s are active within the BizTalk community. This also accounts for some of my colleagues at motion10. There are more companies in the world that have a number of their professionals active within communities. The beginning of this year I interviewed Mark Brimble from Datacom. He is not the only Datacom professional that is active within the BizTalk community. His colleague Johann Cooper for instance is just as active. Today’s story is on him.
Johann has been a Senior BizTalk developer at Datacom for the last year, and he is really enjoying the opportunity to establish and implement best practices with some of the country’s top talent in the field. Prior to that he used to work at Ports of Auckland Ltd. for six years where his career progressed from being more of a support oriented application specialist to a professional with a strong focus on .Net and BizTalk development.
Aside from work and blogging, Johann’s spare time has mostly been consumed by helping his Fiancée Jeska to plan and organize their upcoming wedding. They are getting married in March this year and both are looking forward to a long honeymoon.
“I think we’ll deserve it after the last year’s worth of planning.”
Johann also enjoys running, whether on the treadmill or on the road. While initially quite a painful hobby to get into, he now finds it quite peaceful, and really enjoys himself when he is joined by other running buddies.
Johann has been working with BizTalk Server for three years now, having dabbled in all the versions since 2006, however he now focuses most of his energy on BizTalk Server 2010 for which he has attained Microsoft certification.
“In my first two years working with BizTalk I had to fill all the roles in the SDLC, from business analysis, to development, testing, and even deployment and support. This has given me a good appreciation of many aspects of the product and while I now focus almost purely on development and delivery, I do feel that my previous all-round focus is of great benefit to me now.
“Johann has the following opinions on BizTalk Server:
“What I like the most about BizTalk server is how full-fledged the toolset is, and how easy it is to design and implement systems once the steep learning curve has been overcome. I also think that the BizTalk community is absolutely fantastic and I would not have been able to pick up the platform as well as I have without the stalwart efforts made my community members on blogs and forums. This is what encouraged me to start writing my own blog Adventures Inside the Message Box.”
“I also like that the core design of BizTalk Server allows for the implementation of highly decoupled components that can work together like an orchestra even though they have little knowledge of each other. This makes for easier deployments with less downtime, and also means that systems can be extended and changed in isolation quite easily.”
Finding new and better ways to decouple components in BizTalk has been a bit of a personal mission for Johann and this is why he started the “BizTalk Business Rules Engine Pipeline Framework” Codeplex project.
A final comment from Johann:
“I would like to say a big thank you to readers of my blog for their viewership and encourage every single BizTalker out there to share their great ideas with the rest of the community. We aren’t the biggest of communities compared to many other product groups but we are an innovative bunch, and a lot of that innovation is driven through the sharing of ideas.”
Thanks Johann for your time and contributions to the BizTalk community.
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
