In his session Gianpaolo Carraro discussed the so called five pillars of connected systems. Up to now, when talking about connected systems and service orientation most of the discussion is about how to design services, the four tenets,  best practises, etc. Of course these issues are essential when it comes to connected systems but there are other issues that comes in play when thinking of connected systems. This is where the “five pillars of connected systems” comes in.

The “messaging” pillar is the most fundamental and covers the connectivity possibilities of systems in a standardized way. This is actually the pillars that is discussed over and over already (and will definitely need some more discussion in the coming period).

The other pillars that can be identified are:

·         Identity and Access

·         Data

·         Interaction

·         Workflow

The thing that Gianpaolo tried to explain is that all connected systems that we will build in the future need (to some extend) attention on all of the five pillars.

After discussing the pillars briefly, he also presented his “6 rules for success when building connected systems”.  5 of the rules each apply to one of the 5 pillars and 1 rule just concerns some generic issues not related to any of the pillars in particular. It was actually this one (generic) rule that makes sense to me.

This rule is about “accommodate and anticipate for change”. Sooner or later the system you are building will change, so it’s best to design for that. Some of the techniques he mentioned for that is; make use of abstract factories, provider model, pipeline architecture, separation of concerns and inception points.

I had a little more difficulty with the other 5 rules for success so I will not quote them here. To me they didn’t seem to be “rules” but looked more like summing up some attention points. I think some more details are needed in this area to become real rules.

At the end of the presentation it became clear that all of the 5 pillars will get some extra attention in the near future and the so called rules will be supported by (new) features of some of the Microsoft tools or technologies.

More information about the 5 pillars of connected systems can be found on the blog of Gianpaolo. Not everything is there yet, but according to his blog will arrive soon!

Update: changed the name of the “ intergration pillar”  into “ interaction pillar”. These postings are written during the Tech Ed talks, not a lot of time to validate the content. Thanks Carlo for commenting on this!