It is time to continue the BizTalk Community Series after a recent successful event in Norway, the Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Day. This event was a great opportunity for me to meet up with many Scandinavian BizTalk professionals.
During the two day event we as BizTalkCrew, Kent Weare and Paolo Salvatori (Microsoft) presented about the latest (Windows Azure BizTalk Services, BizTalk 2013), proven technology (Windows Azure Service Bus, BizTalk Mapping, Best Practices and Proactive Monitoring) and BizTalk360.
Today’s story in the series will be on a newcomer in the BizTalk Community, who has recently contributed some great articles on the TechNet Wiki, Suleiman Shakhtour.
Suleiman is 31 years old and married to the wonderful Aseel. They have recently moved to one of the most beautiful cities in Turkey: Istanbul and will soon be expecting their first baby. It would not be a surprise that they are now do al lot of sightseeing and discover a lot of new places in this wonderful city. He is also learning the Turkish language to help him to better interact with people outside of work.
Suleiman enjoys reading and keeping himself fit by attending some fitness classes at the gym. Besides that he enjoys swimming and camping. He is a big supporter of Real Madrid and now that he lives in Istanbul het supports Fenerbahçe.
Suleiman works in this city at VeriPark as a BizTalk Consultant. He has 8 years of experience in development; mainly in web and service development and integration development, however, his journey in BizTalk started back in 2007.
“I have been involved in many B2B integrations mainly in the Finance Sector focusing on SWIFT Accelerator. I was also involved in EAI projects and most of my experience is focused in development.”
In the last 6 years, Suleiman has been involved in a number of BizTalk projects. His responsibilities included writing POCs on how to install and configure BizTalk server in cross-platform environments, providing post project training and handover notes to BizTalk administrators. He has also ran a number of training courses in BizTalk administration and configuration.
“During my integration projects I have worked side by side with Architects to design and implement BizTalk integration solutions. I have always enjoyed challenging projects where I can sharpen my skills and see projects successfully implemented from start to end.”
Recently Suleiman has started contributing to the BizTalk forums by answering questions and writing some TechNet wiki articles.
“I started asking myself how these MVP persons have time to share these articles and contributions to others.”
Suleiman found the answers in an interview with the Microsoft Integration MVP/Wiki Ninja Sandro Pereira. Suleiman got really inspired with this interview as he realized that it is not hard to find the time to make a contribution.
“If you are passionate about what you do, then you need to write down your notes and share your daily experiences with others. This way the lessons you learn at work “the easy way or the tough way” can be shared with others to learn from. Actually, when you contribute and try to answer questions you will start broadening your knowledge and this will encourage you and others to ask a lot of questions and find out solutions for any upcoming scenarios or address current or upcoming challenges at your work.”
Suleiman believes you should try to make these contributions a habit or a hobby. You will be rewarded when receiving gratitude from others as they may be struggling during a project implementation to come up with solutions to some particular issues. Suleiman will do his best to continue his contributions.
Final last words from Suleiman:
“I have noticed most .Net developers have the perception that BizTalk server is a difficult product to learn and understand, but actually when you work with BizTalk you will start to appreciate the real benefits of BizTalk and how it makes integration really easy.”
“I would like to say to readers to stay hungry and passionate to improve their skills and learn new ones. I advise all readers to know their strengths and to start contributing in TechNet Wiki and MSDN forum. When you contribute, you share your knowledge with others and it could help you to challenge and up-skill yourself.”
Thanks Suleiman for your time and contributions.
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
