Well it's over now and it was certainly an experience I'll not forget.

We went to the Archetecture symposium first thing and it was OK.

Focussed on identifying seperate threads of business process which they named value chains.

Once you have your value chains then you can identify common areas between them for example they may all end in a payment process.

Then around each link in the chain identify the sources of information for each and try to establish how you are going to bring the information together. This process is called schema reconcilliation, mapping entities together from different systems. You may have a customer in 3 different systems how are you going to represent this, you need to pull the seperate sources together into a enterprise integration layer which acts as a consolidtor for the information. Of course this could be expensive in terms of performance so these considerations need to be taken into account.

We didn't sit through the second half of this as they had moved onto modelling but instead we went to an Avalon-Indigo integration talk with Chris Sells and Doug Purdy. I cannot say I learn't a lot from it but it was great entertainment and a great way to finish off as we decided to skip any of the last sessions and instead get back to the hotel and sort out a hire car for the rest of our time out here.

Overall it was a fantastic conference and I now Believe the hype and as it was my first time I don't suppose I'll ever match this experience, just need to now focus on how I'm going to use this stuff or at the least make our applications in such a way that they can use it when it's released.