Please feel free to use this forum to discuss any topics you feel are relevant to Government aims and objectives.  Topics might include the following:

• Interoperability
• Electronic Identity
• Privacy
• Business Process
• something else...

This site is monitored by Subject Matter Experts from across Microsoft, and of course by any other users of the site, so ask away!

 Jonny

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Jonny Chambers
Microsoft Public Sector

Goverment? Goverment  of what ? of  who? of where? of why? of when? Goverment? Why not the tooth fairy? or the Easter bunny, or santa heck even the great pumpkin but the GOVERMENT come on guys everybody knows that their is no such thing as GOVERMENT! just look around and think about it, where is this thing called the goverment? If anybody out their can find this thing called Goverment then take a picture of it and send it to monster tracker .com because I for one would like to see what this beast looks like! I thought I caught a glimps of this Goverment hideing in the Bush but after I looked a little closer I was wrong, oh well lets keep looking surely it's out their some where.Look up in the sky it's a bird it's a plane it's ,it's a NUKE from North Korea ! I guess too much RICE can be a bad thing.I hope this post will break the ICE on this discussion so we can get the show on the road!

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Crypto Joe

Thanks for breaking the ice, cryptomanihack.

The boards are offered as an optional extra on the site, and I guess given the community in question, there may be some reticence initially to discuss; however we will see where it goes over time.

I am in the process of recording some videos of folks in MS that work into the public sector to get their thoughts and ideas on the impact of technology, perhaps that will get some thoughts going?

Thanks!

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Jonny Chambers
Microsoft Public Sector

Hi, I work in the local government space in the UK. I guess there may be reticence to share info in this space since theres so much NDA but there shouldnt be a problem discussing general architecture stuff with some government specifics.

Anyway, i'll get the ball rolling from my end. I like the idea of the Connected Government Framework. I assume this is the forum to discuss that? The first iteration of the whitepaper was decent however, it is clear that it is a cut and paste from the Health Framework. Theres the words 'healthcare' and 'healthcare providers' all over the place which can be distracting when you're trying to draw parallels with the architecture discussion to the public sector project you are working on.

I also wasnt sure why there was a separate 'messaging' hub and 'integration hub' in the document. Surely, with Biztalk, (although the architecture may consist of federated hubs), the messaging or orchestrations are just a particular pattern (CBR, Long running processes etc).

It would also be nice to see how this can be related to industry initiatives such as the OASIS SOA Blueprints (how the CGF artifacts map onto the equivalent layers in the blueprint).  Now that WF has also been released, we need info on when to implement some services with WF and when to go for Biztalk.

Hope this makes sense.

Cheers

Benjy

 

Hi Benjy,

Welcome to the forum and thank you for the feedback! 

Indeed, there is a lot of overlap (esp. in the technical architecture) between Government and Health, as many of the fundmental architectural challenges are very similar.  We did struggle with the dilemma how to best present these, deciding in the end to have self-contained, separate frameworks for each area -- while reusing/cloning some of the content (incl. diagrams) where appropriate.  Clearly, we need to do a better job at cleaning this up -- thanks for pointing it out.

Regarding "messaging" and "integration" hub: we just tried to emphasise different roles, not necessarily a separation. We believe that many different "flavours" of the generic "hub" can be instantiated in various topologies, and each will implement some subset of the functionality as needed.  While most would probably include basic messaging and routing capability, they may or may not need to have their own security services, data storage, etc.  The "integration hub" describes the common case where a particular system/node has to be integrated with the rest, and the hub implements the necessary transformations (protocol, format, mode of communication -- e.g. batch) between what that system can do (e.g. dump and read flat files once a day), and what we would like exposed as a common interface (e.g. Web services).  So, in the "integration hub" case the emphasis is on the things needed to achieve integration (incl. bespoke development) -- and the name reflects that specific role.  This does not mean that it is fundamentally different.  While we agree that BizTalk is an excellent platform for all shapesand flavours of these "hubs", we deliberately left the architecture discussion at the platform- and product-agnostic level, looking at what these hubs would need to do -- leaving out the question on how to best implement these, which is influenced by numerous other factors and contraints.  For example, custom-developed (e.g. using Windows Communication Foundation) hub may be appropriate in some scenarios, where deploying a full BizTalk infrastructure is impossible or not feasible.    

Hope I did not confuse you even more... ;-)

Regards,

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Ilia Fortunov

Hi, Thanks for the immediate feedback and the clarifications. Dont worry, you didnt confuse me more!!

I have read the Integration Patterns book as well and, yes, the things you say here are helpful. 

Could be useful to put a note about these being 'topologies' rather than physically separate things in the document itself (just to set the context).  

Perhaps an appendix talking about using specific products and frameworks such as Biztalk, WCF, WF etc would help clarify the points in the framework even more. For instance with the OASIS SOA Blueprint, MS also released a reference implementation and then explained how sharepoint, asp.net etc were used to implement the blueprint. A reference architecture with these products (even if only on paper, and not a physical set of artifacts) would definitely be very useful to visualise how the recommendations in the CGF and CHF would work in practice.

The CGF has definitely helped give me more food for thought in planning my architecture going forward.  I found the discussion of the tModel scheme for authentication levels very useful indeed. This is the first time im hearing of it ,but funnily enough, i had just finished prototyping an access control system where i secured operations on services with similar levels, 0, 1,2, 3 etc and was really chuffed to see that it was a known and accepted way of controlling access.

Keep up the good work. As i work through the document, i'll post more feedback here.

Thanks,

Benjy