On April 6th, during MSDN Briefing, technical event dedicated to developers, testers and system architects, I had a presentation about some practical aspects (like big message maps and automated deployment) of the development process with BizTalk 2004. The presentation had a good feedback from the Microsoft representatives. Interesting enough, nobody in the MSDN audience had experience with BizTalk.
On April, 7th, during the Solution Architect Briefing, I presented a case study of service oriented arhitecture and enteprise application integration and the SCRUM methodology used in that project.
The presentation was a real success, the audience being mostly interested in the SCRUM methodology putting several questions. For instance, some guys hardly beleived that developers meet the end users at the end of the iterations (Sprints), present the developed features and have discussions about the next Sprint. SCRUM comes with a simple, goal oriented approach, which is easy to present and has a big impact on the audience.