One are of software development I have always considered nebulous was licensing. Its challenging just for a product like MS Office, but when you are developing business integration applications, like with BizTalk and host systems, you encounter licensing across companies. Yesterday I was working with Wade Wegner (http://blog.wadewegner.com), a new Microsoft BizTalk guru in Chicago, and he was mentioning the licensing for the IBM Websphere clients that are used with the two versions of the WebSphere MQ adapter (MQSC) for BizTalk. The two versions are for the non-transactional (free) and transactional (not free) versions of the client install for WebSphere MQ as documented here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa705007.aspx.

 

I suppose because of the need to maintain a link or the political ramifications of linking IBM directly to MSDN, the MSDN documentation does not include a link to the files to download to install in order to support the WebSphere MQ adapter. Generally the setup guides for configuring BizTalk host adapters do not include links to the host system companie’s software that must be installed. So if you want to test out the adapter usage in a test environment you will often need to create one yourself based on the available downloads. Here is a link for the free version of the WebSphere MQ client for use with the non-transactional BizTalk MQSC adapter: http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=171&context=SSFKSJ&dc=D400&dc=D410&dc=D420&dc=D430&q1=client&uid=swg24009961&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en.

As part of my ongoing work with BizTalk, I frequently need to download versions of line of business or host system software to test integration with various BizTalk adapters. Determining the best place to get the software to setup VPCs for testing this integration takes a long time to find. I was working recently on setting up environments for Oracle and some ERP systems to work with the BizTalk Line-of-Business (LOB) Adapter pack. I found this link to the Oracle eDelivery site which includes many downloads to setup these VPC environments. Here is the link: http://edelivery.oracle.com/. This site includes available downloads for most Oracle products including ERP systems for companies recently acquired by Oracle like Siebel, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and others.  

 

Also, for really helpful information on integration in IBM environments, go to the search at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/.