After presenting our session about BizTalk Server Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) at Teched 2008, my partner in crime and CTO of Tellago Joe Klug and I decided to coauthor a paper that highlighted the capabilities and architecture of BAM from a developer perspective. The final result is an 87 pages paper that is now available both for download and online on MSDN.
The paper goes beyond the basic functionalities of BAM and explores the internals of its architecture and extensibility model. It also details the intricacies of the WCF, WF and BizTalk Server BAM infrastructures and programming models. Additionally, we've dedicated an entire section to the Business Intelligence (BI) aspects of BAM and its integration with technologies such as SharePoint Server, PerformancePoint Server, Analysis Services or Reporting Services. Finally, my favorite section explores some techniques for building a BAM RESTful API using WCF 3.5 and the Atom Publishing Protocol to expose some of the BAM capabilities as resources accessible through a simple HTTP/Atom interface. This is an idea that my good friend Jon Flanders and I brainstormed a few times last year. Although, given the length of the paper, we decided to just include a very basic version of the API we plan to release a more complete version in the next few months.
Finally, we really need to thank Ofer Askhenazi whose support and patience made this paper possible. Also we've gotten terrific feedback from our technical reviewers: Marcel Fernee, Stephen Kaufman, Jonathan Moons, Allan Naim, Paolo Salvatori, Mr. BAM Andy Shen and Brian Loesgen as well as other reviewers like my buddy Danny del Rio, Microsoft's Jeff King, Toya Lofton and Karl Rissland and Tellago's Elizabeth Redding.