BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed has hit the news stands–grab your copy now!

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Fresh off the presses (quite literally!) the latest book on BizTalk Server 2010 has been released to market and available now at your favorite online bookstore. It has  been a year in the making, working with a veteran author crew (you can read Brian’s blog post here),  and hopefully we managed to hold our own in authoring the 2 RFID chapter in this book   (on BizTalk RFID Server and BizTalk RFID Mobile).

So give the book a whirl (you can get it at Amazon by clicking on the image above) and let me know what you think – whether you are interested in building RFID applications only (which Microsoft has enabled via a stand-alone device mgmt and event processing platform on server and mobile devices), or if you’ve always been curious about the entire BizTalk story, I promise that you wont be disappointed.

Happy reading, and I will leave you with my acknowledgements from the inside cover of the book as well as an abstract from the back cover

Acknowledgments:

Though I was only responsible for the two chapters on RFID, this would not have been possible for a first-time author without a stellar support cast in the background, starting with Ram Venkatesh, my colleague at S3Edge and the primary inspiration behind nudging me down the “authoring” path. The RFID chapters would not have been possible without your selfless help and guidance. So, many thanks, my friend! A big thank-you to Clint Tennill from Xterprise, and Gijs for their time and effort to review and provide invaluable feedback. To Brian and the rest of the veteran authoring crew, thanks for the opportunity to be part of this; you guys totally rock! And finally to Mark, Andy, Neil, and the rest of the crew at Pearson, thanks for your tireless efforts in getting us to the finish line; you guys have been consummate professionals all through the process, and just great to work with.

From the Back Cover

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed is the 100% new, 100% practical developer’s guide to Microsoft’s most powerful version of BizTalk Server. Written by an expert team of Microsoft insiders and BizTalk MVPs, it reflects unsurpassed experience with all phases of BizTalk enterprise solutions development, from planning through deployment and administration.

The authors begin by introducing BizTalk Server’s architecture and key integration concepts. Next, they offer in-depth coverage of BizTalk’s foundational features, including schemas, maps, orchestrations, and pipelines. You’ll learn how to effectively utilize both standard and custom adapters; monitor integration services; leverage cloud computing via Windows Azure; implement operational BI solutions; and make the most of business rules and BizTalk’s Business Rules Engine (BRE).

The authors offer best practices and “in the trenches” tips for everything from managing deployments through implementing state-of-the-art mobile RFID solutions. No other book offers this much useful, pragmatic, and tested knowledge for successful BizTalk development.

Brian Loesgen is a Principal Architect Evangelist on Microsoft’s Azure ISV team. A six-time Microsoft MVP, he has extensive experience in building advanced enterprise, ESB, and SOA solutions. He has coauthored eight books, including SOA with .NET and Windows Azure. Charles Young, a principal consultant at Solidsoft, and Jan Eliasen, an IT architect at Logica, have each been honored repeatedly as BizTalk MVPs, and are highly respected bloggers in the BizTalk community. Scott Colestock, chief architect for Trace Ventures, specializes in using BizTalk to implement integration and service orchestration solutions. He is a member of Microsoft’s Architectural Advisory Board and a BizTalk MVP. Anush Kumar, CTO of S3Edge, served as Microsoft’s RFID business leader and was heavily involved in designing and architecting its BizTalk RFID offerings. Jon Flanders is an independent consultant, instructor for Pluralsight, BizTalk MVP, and author of RESTful .NET.

• Apply BizTalk Server’s sophisticated, scalable message exchange model to support virtually any business requirement
• Get your schemas right the first time, so you can avoid major problems downstream
• Use BizTalk Mapper to create maps for transforming inbound and outbound XML messages and supporting business processes
• Use orchestration to automate even highly-complex processes
• Utilize adapters and WCF to integrate any application, service, or system
• Extend your application’s reach with Windows Azure AppFabric
• Capture key BizTalk infrastructure, services, and business metrics
• Build powerful rules-based solutions with Microsoft’s Business Rules Framework
• Establish an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that uses BizTalk Server as core messaging infrastructure
• Efficiently manage, configure, and troubleshoot BizTalk through the Administration Console
• Create RFID applications ranging from simple label printing to end-to-end business processes

Cheers!

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Introducing Spotlight – an industry first packaged RFID-based asset tracking product for vertical markets from S3Edge

(Fine print: Industry Solution Starter-kits come standard! Click here to learn more)

 

Today we launch Spotlight, our packaged asset tracking product which allows end-users to do the following out of the box:

• View asset movements in real-time by answering the following:
  • “What are all the zones that this asset has been seen at?”
  • “What are the assets that have been seen at this zone?”
• Reason on asset movements by providing business critical inferences such as :
  • “This asset has moved to a new location from <previous location>”
• Find items in the real-world by seamlessly executing real-world search on asset observations and answering the following:
  • “Where was it last seen?”, “Is it in a particular zone now?”
• Act in real-time based on activity observed. Typical examples include:
  • Presence (asset type and location) based feedback
  • Actions based on exceptions (“This asset should not be in a particular zone”)
• Gain business insights from ad-hoc, on ground activity by providing configurable ‘self-service’ reports on asset movements across zones;
  • Ex.: “Tell me where the bags for this flight were last seen”, “Tell me all the missing items in the front store from last audit” etc.

And a whole LOT more!

Read more about it here, and check out our (brand new) website – www.s3edge.com to learn more about Spotlight and the Industry Solutions that we are currently focused on (Tip: DO NOT miss the Virtual Product Tours that show the product in action!).

We’d love to hear from you when you want to Get Started (click here to learn more) with utilizing Spotlight technology for a RFID solution deployment that you are planning.

And if you haven’t seen the video of Spotlight in action at Toll Global Logistics check it out on our website or at our YouTube channel here.

All in all, while this is the culmination of an exciting 2 years in working closely with end-users and delivering on their needs, we look forward to a whole new chapter of scalable, enterprise-ready software solutions unfolding on Spotlight.

I’d love to hear from you if you have any q’s / thoughts / comments –> send me a note or send mail to info@s3edge.com.

 

Cheers!

 

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The Top 5 habits of all successful, packaged RFID applications

Source: www.istockphoto.com

In my last post, we talked about the top 5 critical factors to design for while deploying an enterprise wide real-time visibility system strategy with RFID. 

In this post, I will address what a ‘packaged’ application really means and the ‘Top 5’ characteristics to look for while choosing a packaged vendor

A number of vendors on the market have announced "packaged" applications. Here are some ways to read through the marketing literature to understand the real level of packaging:

1) Simple out of the box installation: Is there a binary installable offering (like a Microsoft installer or setup file). Can the customer IT organization use this to create a deployment instance, or does it need professional services even to just install and get it configured?

2) Clear demarcation between "product" and customization, at the binary level: A large number of "packaged" offerings involve starting from source code and changing it. This is an unsupportable recipe – For fixes and enhancements to be really applied, and breaking changes to be identified and fixed, binary base product is a pre-requisite.

3) Deep leverage of standard development tools: (1) and (2) are possible with completely integrated offerings from proprietary solution vendors, but if customization involves learning a new language, toolset, debuggers, or development methodology, the cost of enhancements will be prohibitive and non-scalable.

4) ‘Centralizable’, remote administration: Even in RFID deployments of scale with multiple support centers, the RFID expertise tends to be concentrated in small numbers of experienced IT departments. They need to be able to get to all the deployed instances and manage them effectively. This has to be self-service oriented, where administrators can completely administer all aspects of their application, including finding devices and antennas that are not working, replacing and adding new devices, configuring user administration, and delegating these capabilities in a self-service manner.

5) Rich out of the box functionality: Yes customization is inevitable for the following layers of the overall deployment:

• Presentation
• Integration,
• Reporting, and
• Human workflow,

…since each organization will want to view the RFID solution in the context of their overall enterprise architecture.

But minimizing the customization to just these areas, without violating tenets (1-4) means the rest of the application, particularly as it pertains to RFID and device specifics, have to be clearly separable and outside the realm of the customization – Typically this means significant out of the box functionality at the RFID level.

Hopefully, this gives you insight into what to look for in a truly packaged application to solve your needs for a real-time visibility system, and you found this useful and valuable.

Looking forward to discussing and demo’ing capabilities of real-time visibility systems from S3Edge that demonstrate #1 through #5 above for your asset tracking needs in discrete manufacturing and warehouse operations! Stay tuned for the next post (and this will be a good customer scenario / ROI focused post! :))

 

Cheers!

/a

Technorati Tags: S3Edge,Real Time Visibility,Real Time Visibility Systems,RTVS solutions,RTVS,RFID 2.0,Packaged RFID solutions,5 habits of succeful packaged RFID applications,Anush Kumar,Ram Venkatesh

The Top 5 factors that most influence a successful deployment of RFID applications in your Enterprise

Your management team comes to you one day and tasks you with figuring out what your enterprise-wide RFID roll-out strategy needs to look like 1, 3, and 5 years from now and the factors to optimize for in order to make it a core competitive differentiator for your organization.

You’ve read all about RFID, are excited about the potential of the technology (viable and useful  technology that can help achieve near term tactical and longer term strategic goals of your organization) but have seen enough minefields (and half-baked success stories) that leaves you in a conundrum, trying to address the following questions:

1. How do I cut through all the FUD and get a deeper understanding of the factors to look for in order to successfully deploy an enterprise-wide RFID strategy?
2. What do I need to look for in a packaged (hardware + software) product that can address my needs today, and 5 years from now?

Source:istockphoto.com

Based on learnings and direct feedback from our early adopters, we’ve attempted to capture some of the salient “must design for” factors that we believe will directly impact the probability of your success – irrespective of whether you go with S3Edge or not as your trusted partner for your enterprise-wide RFID solutions.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at some answers for the first question,in order to optimize for success in your RFID deployments:

 

Source:istockphoto.com

 

1. Device Independence matters New kinds of readers and tags continue to appear, existing products continue to mature, most if not all customers will have a variety of hardware that they will want to choose from. Need a platform that evolves with their needs in a straightforward manner. BizTalk RFID is far and away the leader in this category, the windows device driver like model and the assumptions of scale behind it already have momentum and will continue to build up more momentum as the logo programs and other things kick in. Oracle throwing in the towel here is an example of what the future will be for this category.
2. Devices matter At first glance this might be counter to the point above, but RFID devices continue to be ‘cutting edge’ technology. Having deep device expertise is critical to success on an RFID project, a platform like BizTalk RFID does not mean that anyone who can program BizTalk can really build RFID applications. We have made deep and significant investments in understanding, controlling and taking advantage of the device experience, which gives us a sustainable deep competitive advantage in building RFID applications. Along the same lines, we believe that a robust tag placement and readability offering is critical for any RFID solution provider.
3. Mobility matters The Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile platform (a standalone, yet integral part of the BizTalk RFID server platform) now allows application logic to be executed on device and distribute actions to HH’s / forklifts etc. based on real-time inputs / workflow logic via a rich set of out of box capabilities. These on-device capabilities include connection management, support for online / offline operations, cached storage via SQL CE on device, and web services based integration with multiple end-points for applications that execute on the mobile device. An integral part of any s/w solution package must include mobile apps that are capable of taking advantage of these rich capabilities while perhaps more importantly being able to address the mobile worker use cases like inventory / stock taking out of the box in the context of the business application being deployed.
4. People matter RFID offers the promise of unattended, automatic, ubiquitous data collection that should enable unobtrusive operation. We call this the "observational framework", and it is an important cornerstone of any RFID deployment. However, when the framework detects anomalies, for actions to be taken, people have to be involved. This includes surfacing alerts and exceptions where they happen, enabling the staff on the ground to fix problems instead of compounding downstream errors. This is usually human workflow of some sort, either utilizing fixed stations, or more typically, handheld readers and terminals. A robust and scalable human workflow engine is a critical part of any packaged RFID offering. This has to be ‘tailor-able’ for the specific flows at any given site, while still offering leveraged out of the box functionality for connectivity, login, data synchronization, alerts, and exception management.
5. Packaging matters BizTalk RFID, like its bigger cousin, BizTalk is an ideal platform for System Integrators given the amount of control and flexibility that is possible. This can lead to solutions with extensive customization. Extensive customization is expensive to specify, implement, deploy, support, and service. The way forward is to leverage this platform in a way that reusable solutions are created, and a cornerstone of that is building "packaged" applications, with their desirable ROI and time to deployment profiles.

I hope you found this useful and valuable – If the above resonates or helps with your efforts around RFID, we’d love to hear from you (send me a note, or drop us a line at info@s3edge.com)

Next post: In our next post we will talk to the “The 5 habits of all successful packaged RFID applications”, continuing from where I left off today to address the second question, namely “What do I need to look for in a packaged (hardware + software) product that can address my needs today and 5 years from now?” – stay tuned!

Cheers!

Anush Kumar with Ram Venkatesh

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