The stories continue with the BizTalk Community Series that bring BizTalk community members to the foreground. The eight story will be on Jean-Paul Smit. He created one of the productivity enhancing tools for BizTalk solutions; the BizTalk Software Factory. He is also like me an active member of the Dutch BizTalk User Group. I had a little chat with him a while ago and this is his story.
Jean-Paul Smit lives with his girlfriend and 2 sons of 8 and 10 years old in Hoofddorp, The Netherlands. Since 1997 he has worked with Microsoft products and from 2004 with BizTalk Server. In 2008 he started his own consultancy company to help customers with their integration issues. At the moment he works as a solution architect on the application integration team of a government agency in the Netherlands. Jean-Paul is a BizTalk MCTS and SOA Certified Professional.
Jean-Paul has a broad expertise, yet his focus is on architecture and development in the application integration and cloud area. He has worked in both the developer and architect role on small and large projects. To support the community he started the BizTalk Software Factory project on Codeplex a few years ago. With that tool you can start developing guided and consistent BizTalk solutions, so Jean-Paul is quite familiar with Visual Studio extensions.
Jean-Paul is very curious about the direction that BizTalk is going in the near future. There is a lot of activity in the Azure area with the Service Bus EAI/EDI initiative. BizTalk is a very traditional platform and he wonders when and if customers will move towards Azure for their integration activities. On the other hand he knows BizTalk is a traditional platform, so it will be around on-premise for several years.
A part of Jean-Paul’s spare time is reserved for studying, researching new technology, writing blog posts and articles. At the moment he is working on an article about the Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI (which is published now) and on achieving the SOA Schools SOA Architect certification (which he has done by now, congrats). Besides that he spends as much time as possible with his kids, because they grow up so fast!
Jean-Paul likes mountain biking a lot and depending on the time available he spends between 2 and 8 hours a week on a bike. In 2011 he decided to spend even more time on a mountain bike and achieved 2 major goals by finishing the long distance of the Salzgammergut Trophy in Austria and the Grand Raid in Switzerland. As he states I quote: “Biking in the mountains is awesome!”
His message for the readers of this and other BizTalk related blogs is to keep investing time in BizTalk, also by following this and other blog sites, because he think BizTalk will be around for quite some time.
I would like to thank Jean-Paul for his story and contributions to the community.
