How does a BizTalk guy pack?

From Brian Prince's questionnaire, here is my response.

A BizTalk guy knows that the whole world could be fit into a set of enterprise patterns (scatter/gather, aggregator, resequencer, etc).   So, we don't pack, we orchestrate the moving of all of the other so called *entities*.

Moving is what BizTalk does best.  A BizTalk guy will correlate the moving to a scatter/gather pattern application.  Each crate will be considered a message, and the content of each crate will be the message content. Since BizTalk is all about messages (your stuff),  each crate will be labeled (just like a promoted property) and it will be marked with a GUID (Angie...;). 

Once the contents are inside the Crate, the labels will be used for routing and destination.  As each crate is handled by different external entities, the content will still be private, yet still managed to be transported to the correct destination.

A BizTalk guy does not care what's inside each crate (Message content), all it cares is that it is delivery correctly to the final destination.  The order of the crates departing the old office will not be the same order as they arrived to the new office.  But it is OK, since a BizTalk guy knows how to handle asynchronous messages and knows about scheduling, service window, failed delivery and re-routing.

A BizTalk guy will set a pipeline component that will take all of the inputs and translate them to a canonical message (Crate). A BizTalk guy will take all of these crates from different sources (admin, sales, recruiting, pmo, app dev, management, etc) and orchestrate a smooth move by processing them by their labeled information and not their content.

Being BizTalk of course, this crate will have a guarantee delivery that the contents are the exact same that when it was submitted.  The BizTalk guy will create an orchestration that implements the scatter/gather pattern.  All boxes are then send out in no particular order, to different locations, but they will be find their target destination correctly.

Since this is going to be an asynchronous transportation, the BizTalk guy will make sure that a single receive port location will handle the gather pattern and a confirmation receipt will then be issue. A confirmation receipt can then be handled and after the identity is confirmed a FAB key can be issued.

Of course, a BizTalk guy will create an orchestration:

 

and then attach another orchestration to it

so while other entities talk about

1. Some Borat character(Uzbekistan) and/or browsers add-ins ,
2. how cool is to stay late coding for free ,
3. about boxes and their colors ,
4. color boxes labeled v.2.0 that are not yet delivered,
5. how to pack a box in 5 minutes, versioned it, and then unpack it and repack it on changesets,
6. how to move your stuff by writing random xml code,

only a BizTalk guy does know how to move and in the process deliver quality  :P

Not only a BizTalk guy will deliver all crates and their contents to its destination, but it can also get real time monitoring (BAM) on the moving process and then once the move is done, we can provide with KPI's on the whole process as whole, bringing meaningful reports for ROI.

yeah, that's right... ;)