WCF, WWF, SOA, BPM ... Anything you need to know in this referenced article.
Preparing for New SOA and BPM Development on the Microsoft Platform
By Jeffrey Juday
You can find the complete article here
The Takeaway Recommendations
I left the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2006 with the following 10 action items for my organization, which you can consider for yours as well:
- Adopt WCF as soon as possible, and revise your best practices—including hosting best practices—accordingly. For example, interface and share contracts among many endpoints, or simply offer more endpoints. Also, educate other developers on WCF's uses and benefits.
- Keep moving down the integration technology foundation path you're on currently. Although workflow and messaging will become part of the .NET Framework, BizTalk will be important for scalability and host rich adapter functionality.
- Embrace business process orientation, SOA, and BPM to help build more agile business processes. To do the technology part of this, you'll need to upgrade to SharePoint/Office 2007.
- SOA will become even more important once everyone is using WF inside of Office and Sharepoint. So, get your SOA house in order, and consider the impact of less tech-savvy individuals using your SOA.
- With more SOA use, better visibility into functioning may become important. Now that workflow is no longer hidden behind a black-box program, you may need to turn to business rules to give users the same experience they have come to expect in workflow (for example, self documenting and ease of change).
- Conduct user training to make users more aware of how what they're doing impacts the functioning of the system. Users new to workflow may do unexpected things often because they lack technical understanding.
- Determine the condition of your Active Directory. Do you have the right information to define the level of granularity you'll need to configure access?
- When you put tools in people's hands and they become more savvy with them, that often stimulates ideas for more features or even more creative tool uses. But, it provides more ways to hang themselves as well, so become familiar with the power-user tools. One day, you will need to integrate with them. Also, question and train your tech support people.
- Real-time business intelligence (BI) may become more important. If you're not using Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), you may be soon. As users build more workflow business processes, visibility will become more important, especially for the system-only components of the business process. BAM is one tool for supplying the needed visibility.
- Prepare for the radical change to Office. Begin a dialog with your support and administration staffs to establish a timeline for releasing Office to your group or company. You may be functioning in a mixed Office environment, so determine the impact of this.
