This is a great BizTalk RFID case study in hospitality. :)

Resort Streamlines Skier Check-In, Improves Data Collection with RF Technology

Enhancing the guest experience is central to the corporate mission at Vail Resorts, but ski lift pass authentication for season pass holders was often a time-consuming process due to passes being worn under layers of winter clothing. In addition, the company had little visibility into the skiing patterns of its guests. Vail Resorts switched to season passes embedded with radio frequency (RF) tags that can be scanned through a skier’s jacket, streamlining the pass-holder authentication process. The company also placed RF scanners on upper-mountain lifts to capture lift access data that helps sharpen targeted marketing. The solution uses Microsoft® BizTalk® Server RFID and SQL Server® 2005 to handle authentication transactions, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services for data analysis, and Windows® Communication Foundation for point-to-point data exchange.

Microsoft Case Studies: Vail Resorts

Many of you have asked me about Dynamics Nav and RFID story. Following blog post by Naveen is a great one to get started. 

Now it was left for us to how to provide a solution in a timely manner that our partners and customers could benefit from. To begin with we chose Microsoft BizTalk RFID technology that provides a device independent platform for integrating various RFID scanners, printers and solutions. This technology platform coupled with power of Dynamics NAV gave us ample opportunity to build a showcase implementation.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV and RFID - Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team

American Apparel is one of our customers using BizTalk RFID. Xterprise (www.xterprise.com),  Microsoft RFID partner of the year 2008, Microsoft Gold certified partner  and leading software vendor in recent ABI research has provided their Retail Clarity software for this deployment. Please take a look at an awesome video created by Avery Dennison.

Author: Chip & Dan Heath

This is an awesome book. I was looking for book on storytelling this is an ideal book on that.

Made to Stick focuses on telling your story/message in a way that it sticks with the audience. Author focuses on very common themes like Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, Stories to make the stories stick.

Book also has some good punch line which are good. The one I liked and remembered was “Avoid burying the lead. Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting.”

Other Good quotes:

• "And that's the great thing about the world of ideas --- any of us, with the right insight and the right message, can make an idea stick."
• "Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity."
• "Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you've got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren't certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language."

It is really great book to read. I will try to take authors class if I get a chance it is that good. Enjoy.

We recently launched BizTalk Server 2009 and today we are announcing BizTalk ESB Toolkit. Our customers have been asking us for ESB support in BizTalk Server for a while. Previously we had some guidance for customers on ESB but with today's release customers will get better supported tools for ESB implementation on BizTalk Server 2009.  

The BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 is a collection of tools and libraries that extend BizTalk Server 2009 capabilities of supporting a loosely coupled and dynamic messaging architecture. It functions as middleware that provides tools for rapid mediation between services and their consumers. Enabling maximum flexibility at run time, the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 simplifies loosely coupled composition of service endpoints and management of service interactions.

The BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 provides key building blocks that are required for implementing a comprehensive SOI including:

• Endpoint run-time discovery and virtualization. The service consumer does not need to be aware of the service provider location and endpoint details; a new or modified service provider can be added to the ESB, without interruptions to the service consumer.
• Loosely coupled service composition. The service provider and service consumer do not need to be aware of service interaction style.
• Dynamic message transformation and translation.The mapping definition between distinct message structure and semantics is resolved at run time.
• Dynamic routing. Run-time content-based, itinerary-based, or context-based message routing.
• Centralized exception management. Exception management framework, services, and infrastructure elements that make it possible to create, repair, resubmit, and compensate fault messages that service consumers or BizTalk components submit.
• Quality of service. An asynchronous publish/subscribe engine resolves different levels of service availability and provides high availability, scalability, and message traceability for ESB implementations.
• Protocol transformation. Providing the ability for service provider and service consumer to interact via different protocols including WS-* standards for Web Services. For example, a service provider can send an HTTP Web Service request, which will result in sending a message via Message Queuing.
• Extensibility. Provides multiple extensibility points to extend functionality for endpoint discovery, message routing, and additional BizTalk Server adapters for run time and design time.

Note: BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 only works with BizTalk Server 2009.

For more information about BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0, see BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 on the Microsoft Web site.

BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0

Please let us know your thoughts and if you have any questions/concerns.