Today I dived in the new BAM Portal of BTS2006 Beta 1 and had it up and running BAM in about 1 hour. First of all I Migrate a simple project EAISolution (from the Labs of BTS2004 maybe u know it) and I had a BAM xls SalesManagerView.xls copied to my project directory. The migration from VSS2003 to VSS2005 went perfectly. I filled in a new application EAISolution and deployed it.
After the deployment of the orchestration and the EAISchemas I started up my new Application. So far so good.
Alse a new feature is the Zoom function This orchestration I zoomed out for 50%. Now the Business Activity Monitoring was ahead. The first thing I did was search for the BAM.xls as in BTS2004. I couldn’t find it. In the BTS2006 the Excel Add-in is added to the Toolbox add-in and it is now automaticly checked. So I started up Excel and installed via the Tool menu the new Business Activity Monitoring. Now the Menu Item BAM was added. But I wanted to use the previous Excel Definitions (SalesManagerView.xls). When I started up the file u receive the following message :
I hoped there was a migration option somewhere but I couldn’t find it so I decided to make the Activity and views from the beginning but then in a BTS2006 format like u did in BTS2004. When I finished the Activity and Views (Milestones etc) I exported the XLS to a XML file (option Export XML).
In the older version of BizTalk the BM.exe was the deployment tool for BAM. This tool is changed. In BTS2004 the statement was like this : bm.exe deploy salesmanagersview.xls. The tool generates a Live Worksheet for u and the Business Analist could work with that one. To attach the definition to your Business Process (in my sample EAIOrchestration) the TPE tool was the tool to use. Import the XML Definition file and select to right Assembly and the drag and drop action can begin. In BTS2006 the deployment is a littlebit different. The new statement is : BM deploy-all -DefinitionFile:salesmanagersview.xml. Now the definitions activities,milestones etc are stored in the BAMPrimaryImport Database. To attach the shapes from your orchestration to the Milestones and the Data is a littlebit different. I started up the new Tracking Profile Editor and u can select the deployed BAM Activity Definition from the left pane and the assembly with your orchestration from the right pane.
When I started up the BAM Portal I saw that BIzTalk added a new folder SalesManagerView nested with Activity Seach and Aggregations. What I missed was the folder Alert Manager. You can read this in the documentation Scott Woodgate posted on his blog, one of the new features of BTS2006. I started up the BizTalk Server Configuration to see if the BAM Tools –> BAM Alerts was installed. I saw that the check box was not on, but I installed SQL Notification Services. (Strange !!). After read some documents I noticed that I installed the wrong version of SQL Notification Services. U have to install SQL Server 2000 Notification Services, Standard Edition 2.0 SP1 and I installed an earlier version. So I uninstalled that version and installed the newer version and started up the BizTalk Server Configuration Tool and I noticed that I could press on the check box , filled in all the Alert field like Alert File Location (Network drive) , SMTP Server , Alert Database. The last option in this screen gives me an error the Prefix of the Alert Database names. I filled in BAMAlerts and everything went fine. I think this is a small bug. I reported this to the Microsoft guys.
BizTalk generates two extra database : BAMAlertsApplication and BAMAlertsNSMain.
A little example of the BAM Portal u can so here :
I will tell u the alert functionality in my next post