Yesterday I have received the “Real World SOA” kit from Microsoft India.  The kit was covered by a cute blue with orange color bordered box with the caption “Microsoft presents Real World SOA – SOA that leverages your existing IT infrastructure”.

After opening the box, I saw a letter from Karun Thareja, Sr. Product Manager in Microsoft India regarding the specialty of the kit.  The kit contains two white papers, one leaflet about BizTalk 2006 and one “Understanding SOA with Web Services” book.

It was surprised for me that other than the above the kit does not contain trial or demo software, feature products leaflet.  The letter by Karun Thareja conveys a clear message that Microsoft is seriously thinking about your IT infrastructure for SOA and of course the feature of its products.

I started to read the whitepaper on “Enabling Real World SOA through the Microsoft Platform”.  Though it was published on December 2006, it briefly explains SOA, its important and the line of products from Microsoft for SOA.  I was pretty impressed the way the whitepaper started.   I’ve read lot of SOA papers from various companies, some of them are not clear about SOA even though they have released tools for SOA.  Some of them presenting SOA in such a way to show it as a complex one as like as rocket science.  This white paper explains SOA and its benefits in a simple manner and helping the people to know where to start and how to start their SOA implementation.  One fine thing I’ve found that Microsoft  recommends to start SOA implementation with “Middle out” strategy with one business need at a time, instead of going with “Top-down” or “Bottom-up” approach.

I am yet to read another one whitepaper “Understanding BizTalk Server 2006” by David Chapell – Chappell & Associates at August 2005.  But hope that it will be good.

Finally, without any explanation, everybody knows the major intention of this kit is “Microsoft BizTalk”.  Why not?