Of course there are lots of articles on MSDN or the Microsoft Architecture Journal on Service Orientation, Business Process Management and finally Enterprise Service Bus. Many of them are really good but almost all of them dig into some details of a specific topic (such as Service Oriented Modelling or BPM implementation details specific to a technology etc.).
Therefore more and more customers are asking us during customer meetings for providing a complete view on Microsoft’s strategies on all of these trends (SO, SOA, BPM, ESB, Software + Services) and that was the reason for giving such a strategic overview in the 18. Architect Forum in addition to covering Software + Services and Software as a Service specifically.
As I promised at the last architect forum to write a paper on BPM, I decided to take the chance and write such a paper right know. But instead of covering BPM strategies (which our 17. Architect Forum was all about), only, I decided to put all the trends together and summarize my opinion on Microsoft’s overall view on all of these trends and how they are related to each other. I decided to split this paper into two parts: one part which covers classic topics such as Service Orientation or BPM at a very high level and a second part that digs into some details on Software + Services and Software as a Service specifically.
It is important to understand, that my target with the paper is providing a big picture and showing the relationship between all the different aspects instead of digging into details of each and every single aspect. Therefore, within the white paper I refer to many, really great articles from peers such as Beat or Gianpaolo. So if you know many of the topics, already, you can use it as a reference to articles covering topics in great detail.
You can download the first part of the paper right within this post. It covers the following topics:
- Service Orientation @ Microsoft: The three-part Model
- The Business Model - Capturing and Organizing Business Capabilities
- From Business Capabilities to Services
- The Service Model
- Technical Model - Microsoft’s Platform for Building Services
- Business Process Management and Microsoft
- Microsoft’s Strategy on Enterprise Service Bus
- User Experience for Architects - Composition is Core
- Model Based Management of Services
- Software Factories as an Approach for Building Systems
- What do we have today?
- (Some of) Microsoft’s Future Plans
Please remember, always, that this paper expresses my point-of-view on Microsoft’s strategies! If you want to know, how all the trends are interrelated, please go on and take a look a this paper. I spent some nights in writing it and I really hope it is useful to you…
Download the white paper here…