Thanks for checking out my blog. Jon invited me to spin this up on his site. Well that’s not actually what happened, I invited myself but he didn’t put up much of a fight.

I figured that Jon’s blog was so full of practical information that someone had to bring the signal to noise ratio down a little bit. I volunteered to provide an ivory tower viewpoint to Jon’s real world implementation experiences documented in his blog and on his wiki. You see I’m a product manager on the BizTalk Server team at Microsoft.

We don’t actually have ivory towers at Microsoft. I, myself, work in building 3 which is a rather squat ‘X’ shaped building on the east end of campus.

Some folks that I’ve spoken to do subscribe to the opinion that we do work in ivory towers which are far and away from the guys and girls in the trenches who work with our stuff daily. That is what I’d like to dispel in this blog.

I don’t intend to point to all of the latest and coolest stuff that's going on. Scott does that really well. Nor do I intend to delve deep into the BizTalk engine (like Lee) or explore heavy duty developer topics (like Jon). I will point to exceptional BizTalk resources when I find them but the main thrust of this blog will be to discuss things that make you scratch your head when implementing BizTalk Server applications. If you find yourself wondering, “Why the heck did they do that?” then “that” will be a good topic of discussion for this space. If you feel the urge then post a feedback comment here on something about BizTalk Server which sticks in your craw. Comments like that just may implore me to blog thier topics.

By the way, my opinions are not necessarily those of Microsoft or anyone else’s at Microsoft. I don’t make a habit of biting the hand that feeds me but if all I wanted to do was communicate Microsoft approved content I’d commission a whitepaper or issue a press release. Do not confuse my opinion with any official policy. It certainly is not that.

In closing let me thank Jon for providing a platform and you, of course, for participating in it with me.

Regards,

Mike Woods

Sr. Technical Product Manager

Business Process and Integration Division

Microsoft Corporation