I just realized that I forgot one of the coolest parts of BAM. The events that you track don't have to come from BizTalk. Events can be “intercepted” by mapping them to messages or orchestrations but there are also simple (synchronous and asynchronous) API's for recording events from any process. This is key since, in most cases, not all of your systems will be integrated with BizTalk on Day 1.
Well, as usual, I have reached my GSP (Geek Saturation Point). After 5 days of sessions, I am just staring ahead with glazed eyes. TechEd has been GREAT this year. The VS.NET stuff looks really cool, but waiting until next year for it sucks rocks!
Last night's party at Sea World was fine. Good food, not too crowded. I would appreciate that sort of thing a lot more if my family was here. As it is, I just wandered the park looking at the animals.
I am going to one last session on the MSBuild tool that is part of VS.NET 2005. Then it's off to the airport and back to the real world.
Yesterday, I saw a really good presentation on BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) in BizTalk 2004. I had always heard this as a way to track your Orchestrations through the system. That was something sorely lacking in previous versions, so it wasn't something that really captured my attention. I had a "I'll learn it when I need it" attitude. As it turns out, it is much more than that.
Here is a scenario. I have a business process such as a typical fullfillment system. This system has a set of 'Business Activities' (I prefer the other term they use, 'Events') that occur during the normal processing of a transaction. For example, an order can be received, declined, paid, approved, backordered, shipped, delivered, etc. You can think of the timespan between events as a "Phase". For example, "Shipped" and "Delivered" would be the "In-tranist" phase. Each activity has a set of data associated with it, called the payload. The payload for the Shipped event might be carrier, tracking code, ship date/time, estimated delivery date/time.
In BAM, a business analyst creates a set of Business Activities using an extension to Excel. They also create a set of "Business Views". This defines how the business user needs to be able to analyze the data. Essentially, they are creating mockups of the pivot tables they would like to be able to get from an OLAP cube to analyze the data. All of this information together is called the "Obersavtional Model". It's how we want to "observe" the business process.
At this point I am thinking about how I would design a system to collect and store all of the activity data. Then you need to create DTS jobs to move it into a star schema so that it can be loaded into an OLAP cube. After that, you can define virtual cubes for the business user to access. You also have to deal with data archival, cube partitioning, etc.
This is where BAM shines. Remember that Excel file the Business Analyst created that defined their requirements? You use the BAM interface to fully provision and deploy a complete OLAP implementation for the system!!!!!!! It creates the load tables, DTS jobs, star schemas, cubes, etc. to capture, view, secure and maintain this data over the LONG TERM. Wow!
As I was watching this presentation yesterday, I quickly realized that I am about to build a system that does exactly this processing. We were torn between BTS 2002 and 2004 because the HIPAA Accelerator isn't available yet for 2004. Now I have to go back to Omaha and talk them into 2004. This is a perfect fit for their needs.