Interview with a BizTalk Advisor Wiki Ninja!!! - Tord G. Nordahl

We're continuing our Monday series, "Interview with a Wiki Ninja!" Today's ninja is Tord G. Nordahl!

Tord G.Nordahl (Profile)

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Tord Glad Nordahl, a young guy from Bergen, Norway. I am married and have a little girl (soon father of two). I'm currently working for Bouvet as a BizTalk advisor. My job gives me the opportunity to travel the world and explore the divers capabilities of BizTalk at all kinds of different companies. By doing this I gain a lot of experience and knowledge. That is not all as I also get the chance to do presentations. This month I'm heading to London to do a presentation for the BizTalk user group. In May I'm heading to Italy together with MVP's Steef-Jan Wiggers, Sandro Pereira, Saravana Kumar, and BizTalk community member Lex Hegt. The BizTalk MVP Niño Crudele will host an event, where we all will do some presentations. I will be talking about host thresholds and automatic throttling. (I love traveling and speaking).

What do you do with the TechNet Wiki and how do that fit into the rest of your job?

This is an interesting question, and I could probably go on and on. First of all, for me contributing to the wiki is like sharing my notes, hints, tips and knowledge. All this information can be read by anyone. Best of all the community can edited, update or add more content. So, what does this give me in the end, a better knowledge when collaborating information with others and the feeling that I’m doing something right for the community. I created a lot of articles related to BizTalk administration and deployment. And I take these articles with me to my day to day job. When I finish of at a client I leave some links to the different articles related to their needs. For instance what I recommend them to do is setting up the BizTalk guidelines.

So the customer gets a good reference and I am satisfied helping them. Writing emails or handing out PDFs won’t be the same in my view. Basically because I feel it’s not “live”, nor is it up to date, and the customer may not be able to use it as a reference in 6 months, a year etc. The TechNet wiki is live and can be updated as often as new information or relevant information is available. This is one of the most important feature I see with the Wiki.

If you write good articles, and with relevant information you’ll get noticed, not only by Microsoft, but by other members of the community, others using the technology you like. I love the comments on my articles, where people state that it was helpful or saying thank you for my contributions. Often I get emails from people and they may need a reference of one of my articles, or someone reads one of my articles and contacts me, asking me for more information, or other relevant information. Either way, these things gives me a great feeling; the fact that I helped someone out. I try to do the same to the articles I read and find valuable. Recognitions is always good, no matter who said it.

Lately I’ve done some more fun on the TechNet Wiki, I’ve joined the “International battle” converting articles over to Norwegian. You can find my Norwegian articles by searching for the tag NorwegianNinja. So now I’ve talked about how great the Wiki is, but what does it mean in a working situation, it’s easy. I got a ton of good articles that I use almost every day. I meet a lot of other people and creating new relations across platforms and technologies. In the end it benefits me, my company, and the community!

What are your favorite articles you’ve contributed?

My favorite articles must be the article about Automatic throttling, this is a resources many have asked for and is hot in the community, in addition to this are the host thresholds as they both walk hand-in-hand. The last thing I wanted to add was the Performance Counters for BizTalk. But I must say many of my articles are my favorites, basically because I use and reference them very often.

Do you have any tips for new Wiki contributors?

Yes I do, there’s nothing you can do wrong, and there is nothing that’s not good enough. If you have a plan commit to it, and get it out there! Ask for help if you’re stuck and enjoy it! And remember sharing is knowledge!