Acknowledgments

Susie Adams: It would be difficult to say that authoring this book was an effortless and challenge-free process. The challenges began with obtaining approval to write the book and concluded with the daunting task of locating authors in the eleventh hour to tackle some of the most challenging chapters. Many people and resources have gone into making this a successful endeavor. First and foremost I'd like to thank my management at Microsoft for standing by me during the lengthy approval process. I'd also like to thank the BizTalk product team—in particular Nagender Vedula, John Ballard, Scott Woodgate, and Bryan Nylin—for building an awesome product, giving me the support and assistance I needed when scavenging for authors, and answering my questions. It goes without saying that the Sams publication staff deserves much of the kudos and thanks for the completion of this book. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Shelley Kronzek, the Executive Editor for this project, Songlin Qiu, the Development Editor, and Christina Smith, the Project Editor. Without their help and patience, this could not have happened.

I'd like to specifically acknowledge Larry Wall, the Technical Editor who gave up many weekends, missed Thanksgiving dinner, and even worked while hanging Christmas lights! Of course, none of this would be possible without the tremendous efforts of the other coauthors (thank goodness!) on this project: Larry Wall, Akhtar Hossain, Dilip Hardas, Rand Morimoto, Stephen Tranchida, Kevin Price, Rob Oikawa, Bill Martschenko, Cuneyt Havlioglu, Rick Pearson, Charlie Kaiman, Cliff Cannon, and Tom Lake. I commend and thank each of them for their dedication in helping to make this a book a success.

Akhtar Hossein: I want to thank my Managing Consultant, Robyn Pierce, for believing in me and giving me the chance to implement my first BizTalk project. I am grateful to my customers for their strong support and encouragement at Clear Channel (Steve Solomon and Henry Dwrefs), at Tyco Flow Controls (Doug Snyder and Jeff Lynch), at Compaq (Ravnish Luthra and Reza Wajih), and at Dell (Greg Hansen and Manohar Rao). I am also grateful to Sams Publishing for giving me this opportunity and all the editors for tolerating my awful slipped schedules and delays.

Kevin Price: Thanks to Susie Adams for getting me involved; Scot Johnson at i3solutions; Shelley, Pamalee, Songlin, and all at Sams Publishing for keeping things going; and my wife—for not hiding the keyboard.

Rand Morimoto: I want to thank my wife, Kim, and our two children, Kelly and Andrew, for their patience and support as I had my head down at my computer to do the writing for this book.

Rick Pearson: I would like to thank Bill for suggesting me on this project and Susie and Shelley for giving me the chance to do it. I would also like to thank the entire Sams team for guiding me through the process. I would especially like to thank Erin for being so understanding during those late nights and marathon weekends.

Tom Lake: I would like to thank Mahendra Agrawal for encouraging me to apply for the position with BizTalk Server. I am also grateful to all the excellent people on the BizTalk Server team who I work with. Without them we would not have such a wonderful product.