The University of Lincoln is home to a growing community of students worldwide. They own a reputation for innovative teaching and were awarded a five-star score in 2020. They also rank in the top 30 for student satisfaction.
The University of Lincoln encountered the following difficulties:
The University of Lincoln, before BizTalk360, faced numerous challenges to having a clear view of its BizTalk environment. This included how systems are running; hence the team preferred to have an exclusive dashboard. Moreover, report generation to get an insight into current running processes and system availability was an arduous task, due to the lack of efficient tools available at that time. As BizTalk integrates with several internal and external systems, there is always a risk that a service could be down. Currently, the environment is hosted around two frontends BizTalk 2013 R2 servers with a clustered SQL instance. The team has around 30 applications hosted across two servers.
The BizTalk360 team demoed the product during their flagship event, “Integrate”. Within a few minutes, the team understood how this would massively improve their efficiency. After installing the product, the team resolved all the challenges they had faced earlier. Any issues in their environment are always dealt with quickly and effectively using BizTalk360. With the help of the BizTalk360 support team, the initial onboarding process was done quickly and efficiently. Thanks to BizTalk360, we have seen increased productivity and efficiency.
Since University of Lincoln holds multiple applications in their environment, BizTalk360 helps in multiple areas, and it is especially beneficial in the following areas:
Dashboard – One-stop shop for teams to see everything going on in real time. This is extremely helpful for spotlighting potential issues before they escalate and cause a system outage.
The team also added that the biggest reason for using BizTalk360 is for management functionality that is, the product enables the users to turn on/off the applications and its artifacts without logging in to the admin console.
When the University of Lincoln realized that they owned a highly available BizTalk environment and needed better management controls over the system, with BizTalk360, the team provided immense time to core developers to develop BizTalk solutions. BizTalk360 improved their efficiency with enormous solutions, which made them include support personnel to act upon them.
“On several occasions, we have hit major message box issues, namely lots of queuing messages. We attempted to fault find them using the BizTalk admin console but couldn’t find the root cause. With the BizTalk360 application, we could spot patterns in the message being processed and uncover why the message box was expanding so quickly. I doubt we would have found this without using BizTalk360. The team at BizTalk360 was on hand to assist us should we have needed them, and we knew we could count on their expertise and experience if we came unstuck.
-Steven Audis , Systems Architect & Product Manager
Microsoft BizTalk Server
The product holds the best functionality that a BizTalk person requires daily, and this remains a go-to system when they want to find errors. The team added that when they started the BizTalk journey, they realized they wanted to manage and monitor tools for their setup as they had a limited set of people.
