Last year I started a new job with a logistics company in the North of England, where I was responsible for the management, design and development of IT Integration strategies, architectures and solutions using BizTalk Server 2009. This included the design and implementation of the BizTalk Server 2009 infrastructure, the definition of development standards, mentoring a fellow developer in the ways of BizTalk and migrating a number of existing solutions from Softshare over to BizTalk 2009.
Unfortunately I then realised that, following this initial set up, there didn't actually seem to be that much BizTalk work for me to get stuck into and reluctantly I have now moved on from this role to a very similar role with the country's largest office supplies company. Based in Sheffield, we distribute office supplies on a UK wide basis and computer supplies across Europe.
The situation here is slightly different than when I first joined my previous employer. Whereas that was a green field installation with no previous BizTalk solutions in place, my new employer currently has a number of live BizTalk 2000 (!) and BizTalk 2006 solutions in place. Unfortunately the infrastructure around these is less than ideal; with no clear distinction between development and test environments and no source control what so ever!
We are currently building a proposal for a new BizTalk Server 2010 implementation, where I am hopeful of being able to implement fully independent development, test and pseudo-live environments, alongside an enterprise level live installation. We should also be introducing Team Foundation Server to the development process, thereby giving us some much needed source control capabilities.
Following this is likely to be a period of migration for the existing BizTalk Solutions, along with the onward development of new projects and initiatives - I'm hoping to be a busy man for the forseeable future :o)
