A Better Rules Engine for BizTalk

Last night I (along with my colleague Dave Birchall) had the privilege of presenting at Microsoft Australia to the BizTalk Users Group (thanks Mick Badran!).

Our topic centred around the InRule business rules engine and business rules management system - and how it might work with Microsoft BizTalk Server. As many of you in the world of BizTalk might know from experience, the BRE supplied can be quite limiting and inefficient to work with.

So how do you go about using InRule to supplant the BRE?

Quite simply really. You have 2 main options to call InRule from the BRE:

1. Utilise the supplied irAdapter that comes with the InRule irServer installation


2. Call a static .NET method from an Expression Shape in a BizTalk orchestration - which in turn calls upon the InRule runtime libraries to apply rules to the data you pass.

InRule can supply much greater flexibility and capabilities beyond what the BRE was designed or intended for. You may find the BRE is suitable for your needs, but as soon as you go beyond simple IF ... THEN statements, you might want to have a look at a 30 day trial of InRule to see if it is appropriate.

In the coming weeks I will also put together a video on InRule with BizTalk including a demonstration on how to phyiscally connect BizTalk to InRule. So stay tuned!

FYI: If you missed last nights demonstration I can arrange for you to view a copy online. Just drop me a comment below and I will get in contact with you.

Outlook Web Access (OWA) Not Sending Emails

Recently I found myself out of the office with web mail access only. As we have Exchange 2007 I was able to connect to our web mail via Outlook Web Access (OWA). I found that I would compose a new email (or reply) and hit 'send', but the new message would only be persisted and get stuck in the Drafts folder.

This seemed to only happen on occasional days, and it didn't matter if I was using the OWA Light Version or Full Version. Nor did it matter that I was using it from my mobile or laptop or home computer.

After some hunting I found the solution:

Don't leave Outlook running under your session/user account on any other computer! Close all other sessions you may have open!

It appears that if you have an active Outlook session from say a desktop, or remote desktop (TS) connection - your web mail from OWA will not send. This was a hair pulling event for me - hopefully it helps you with a possible frustrating set of patches, updates, security changes in your browser etc. etc.