Every year, BEAWorld brings together technology experts, industry visionaries, business leaders, and hundreds of architects for an exciting exchange of information about new technologies, networking with your peers, and great tips you can put to work right away. Don’t miss this year’s program, which is packed with 29 sessions designed specifically for architects. Check out session tracks including Gaining Business Value from SOA: from Pilot to Payoff; Enterprise Judo: Turning Heterogeneity to Your Advantage; SOA for Business Integration...Getting the Most out of Your IT Assets; Liquid Thinkers: Real Companies in Action, and more. You can start planning your agenda now, with pull-down menus on our Web site to show you which sessions are most appropriate for architects. So come to BEAWorld in San Francisco September 19^th and 20^th: These two days could be the best investment you make in your professional development this year.

SOA is an exciting concept, but as architects know, it can be vague. For those who are tasked with the “A” in SOA, the Open SOA Collaboration (www.osoa.org) is the place to look. The “A” in SOA is of course ?architecture?—and in practice, that often comes down to “assembly” of services.

Business process management requires business and IT to have one tangible artifact that represents what they want to execute, and how. This white paper describes how to capture and model a business process using BEA AquaLogic BPM Designer, and then how IT can use BEA AquaLogic BPM Studio to turn it into an executable. It also shows how the process can include Web services interaction, as well as communication with the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus and BEA WebLogic Integration controls.

Recently acquired by BEA, Flashline is now available as the BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository. Jon Mountjoy interviews Flashline CEO Charles Stack, who discusses metadata repositories, SOA, and what BEA AquaLogic Enteprise Repository means for developers, architects, and IT managers.

If you’ve been tasked with creating a secure solution to provide content and information to thousands of people, think “extranet.” BEA Systems and ebizQ report on the extranet market in a white paper that provides a comprehensive analysis of needs and challenges organizations face in building extranets, details of how portal technology can help, and two case studies of BEA AquaLogic User Interaction customers that have built successful extranets.

BEA Education Services has pulled together a groundbreaking series of courses targeted at senior IT management and enterprise architects who are either beginning to explore SOA, or have implemented a pilot project and want to expand the use of SOA.