Welcome Speech at INTEGRATE 2016
The event kicked off sharp at 0845 with Saravana Kumar, Founder/CTO of BizTalk360 welcoming the attendees. The statistics of this year’s INTEGRATE 2016 event stood at 380 attendees, 187 Companies from 22 different countries. The key highlight of the welcome session was the announcement of the availability of a printed version of “BizTalk Mapping Patterns” book by Sandro Pereira.
And here we go! #integrate2016 is LIVE at @ExCeLLondon and Live streaming is on #msbts pic.twitter.com/2wBB4t58Ms
— BizTalk 360 (@BizTalk360) May 11, 2016
Keynote
Saravana Kumar handed over to Jim Harrer, Principal Group Program Manager to deliver the INTEGRATE 2016 keynote session. Jim started off talking about Microsoft’s vision, strategy, goals, integration road map and within the first few minutes, came the confirmation of BizTalk – “BizTalk is not dead!”. It became very clear that Microsoft’s vision was aimed & focused towards delivering a unified integration experience across on-premise, hybrid cloud and cloud. This is a more robust vision from Microsoft and delivers the feel good factor for the #msbts community. Jim continued his talk and stressed that “BizTalk Server and Logic Apps is the core of Microsoft’s vision into the future”. The vision is more towards achieving a balanced view on integration instead of “all in the cloud”. Then came the most photographed slide in the session – Microsoft’s vision for Integration that explained what Microsoft is planning to have in its arsenal to provide the unified integration experience both on-premise and cloud.
Key Highlights from INTEGRATE 2016 Keynote – Summary
- BizTalk and Logic Apps form the core of Microsoft’s Integration vision
- BizTalk and Logic Apps combined together will deliver hybrid integration scenarios much easier
- Out-of-the-box two-way communication between BizTalk Server and Logic Apps. Logic Apps can call/post message to BizTalk receive location.
- Enterprise Integration Pack: one of the first add-ins to Logic Apps – premium offering with support for EDI/TPM, maps and schemas
- New Integration Accounts (place to store schemas, maps, certificates, and TPM agreements) will enable Flat File assembly/dis-assembly in Logic Apps
- Positive signs of development teams growing within Microsoft. Microsoft is hiring engineers for both Logic Apps and BizTalk Server development teams

BizTalk Server 2016 – What’s New?
Jon Fancey continued his talk on what’s coming up in the CTP 2 of BizTalk Server 2016, and the timelines for GA of the product. Microsoft announced the availability of CTP 1 of BizTalk Server 2016 in April. The CTP2 is expected this summer. The primary focus for CTP 2 are –- HA Improvements
- Platform Refresh
- Addressing customer requirements and pain points
- Cloud connectivity

Logic Apps adapter will be released as part of BizTalk CTP2 #Integrate2016 — Saravana -BizTalk360 (@saravanamv) May 11, 2016In addition, the Logic Apps BizTalk connector and actions will also be made available so that you can easily connect and consume the BizTalk functionality. This will provide seamless integration between Logic Apps and BizTalk. Jon touched on the point about the “UI Refresh” in BizTalk Server 2016, and he addressed it as “Repaint”. The Repaint will give a modern, consistent look and feel to the product. The integration between BizTalk server and Logic Apps will bring together a world of new possibilities such as –
- Patterns – Solicit/response, request/response, fire-forget
- Polling HTTP Endpoints – This is a welcome break for developers as they no longer have to use Schedule task adapter for this purpose
- Run Logic App on a configured Schedule
- Consume BizTalk Capabilities – Call into and augment existing BizTalk processes, existing capabilities like Rules and so on
Powerful Integration and Workflow Automation
It was time for Kevin Lam and Jeff Hollan to talk on Powerful Integration and Workflow Automation. The key highlights of the session were –- Out of the box connectors available with Logic Apps – the list keeps growing every week
- Upcoming connectors
- Visual Studio Integration for Logic Apps. The Logic Apps Designer will be made available in Visual studio
- Nested Workflows, switch statements, scoped flows, and many more
- Microsoft Operations Management Suite to get a holistic view of what’s happening within your Logic App
- Jeff introduced Howard Edidin to talk about a real-world integration scenario with Logic Apps for a healthcare organization
- Integration patterns for Logic Apps
- More mature Release Management
Enterprise Functionality Roadmap
Post lunch at INTEGRATE 2016, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey started their talk on Enterprise Functionality Roadmap. Few highlights from the session –- Enterprise Integration Pack Preview – Companies can centralize their artifacts when integrating with trading partners. These artifacts can be directly used from Logic Apps in conjunction with AS/2 and X12 Decoders
- Integration Account
- Creation of VETER (Validate, Extract, Transform, Enrich, Route) Pipelines as a Logic App
- New Compose function
- X12 and AS/2 support to be added. EDIFACT will be added down the road, together with TPM and party resolution
Integrations Made Simple – Microsoft Flows
Charles Lamanna introduced the concept of Microsoft Flows. Immediately when the concept was shown, the Twitter feed of #integrate2016 started to say Microsoft Flows is very similar to IFTTT offering from Microsoft. Flows is aimed at non-developers (business users) and it sits on top of the Logic Apps engine. Flows is mainly intended for light weight use case scenarios where there is a possibility to automate routine tasks. For example – Copying tweets from twitter to Dropbox, SharePoint to SalesForce integration, and so on. Currently, Microsoft Flows has a template library that allows users to get started with using this functionality.
- Use of Policies and Expressions
- Azure Functions can be used in Azure API Management

With this we wrap up the summary of Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2016. Stay tuned for the updates from Day 2, and Day 3. Take a look at the pictures from Day 1 of INTEGRATE 2016 here. Special thanks & mentions to our live streaming crew (Karma), our Photographer (Tariq Sheikh), and our videographer (Nigel Camp) for their excellent contribution at INTEGRATE 2016.Winding down with @lwilliams_dev after a busy day filled with great sessions #selfie #Integrate2016 pic.twitter.com/D7mQUdeBSf
— Rob Hancock (@BMBoris) May 11, 2016
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