Welcome

Hey everyone. Kris here. I wanted to follow up Mike's great kickoff with an introduction as well. First, I'd also like to acknowledge the years of devotion and tireless commitment Scott Woodgate gave to fostering and growing the BizTalk Server community. I don't think I fully appreciated Scott's role in shaping the way we understand BizTalk and it's constituent technologies until I joined Microsoft and the BizTalk team last August. A couple days after I started, Scott pointed to a dusty computer in the corner of his office and said "You know what that is? That's BizTalk.org" I scratched my head for a second and then was suddenly struck by memories of a modest green and white website with grand dreams of being a global schema repository. That was in 1999 and the release of the BizTalk Jumpstart Kit and BizTalk.org spurred a transformational shift in how I think about solving business problems with technology. Since then there have been numerous instances where Scott's perspective on the past, answers about the present, and clarity of vision for the future have propelled the community forward. So, my sincerest thanks to Scott for getting it all started, leading so many of us into this space, and ensuring that BizTalk has a vibrant and open community.

As Mike mentioned, there will be four of us contributing regularly to this blog in the hopes that together we can provide our unique perspectives on BizTalk and Business Process Management in general. I'm the BizTalk Technical Product Manager which means I'm responsible for the technical readiness of our employees, partners, and customers. This includes everything from making sure we have the necessary training resources to clearly articulating our positioning on technical issues. Through this blog I'll be announcing the availability of new training resources (like whitepapers, webcasts, courses, books, samples, community efforts, etc.) and providing insight into how BizTalk relates to other technologies and the role it plays industry initiatives (SOA and Microsoft's workflow strategy are on the short list). In addition, I'll be discussing how we envision BizTalk's future.

With the release of BizTalk Server 2006 right around the corner there's plenty to talk about and I encourage you to hit us up with post suggestions. Let the dialog begin!

Cheers,
Kris