Acting as the BBot dev project team lead at Covast, I can tell you we’re all heads down working towards an RTM of BBot in June! There have been many (many!) challenges on the way to date, including things like:
- How do you replace a BBot in the field that has, for example, harddisk problems and you don’t want to bother the owner with technical details?
- What do you do when a BBot goes down during a BizTalk configuration update?
- How do you automatically deploy Infopath templates in a SharePoint Services template library?
- How do you synchronize the “go live” of a new AS2 certificate?
- How do you make sure the BBot Registry doesn’t get swamped when a Hub’s 1000’s of trading partners with BBots need a new configuration?
We’ve cracked them all!
Enter the world’s first B2B appliance that completely automatically configures itself remotely, stays up-to-date automatically with the latest patches and QFE’s and provides full integration capabilities between a Microsoft Office (Outlook, Excel, Infopath, SharePoint) environment on one side and standard B2B (EDI, XML, RosettaNet, HIPAA, etc.) formats and protocols on the other side. A true black-box approach with full integration facilities, including BAM.
This is what the architecture looks like in a nutshell (click to enlarge):
In the meantime, we’re continuing L2 (Negative scenarios) and L3 (Stress) tests and working with Network Engines to finalize the BBot “Image” and making the appliance production-ready.
Cheers,
Gijsbert
indaField 