For storing configuration data, Jon Flanders’s SSOAppConfig tool is my preferred answer. On my recent migration from 2004 to 2006, my good buddy discovered that the BizTalk Admin Group and BizTalk User Group are hard-coded into Mr. Flanders’s solution. We tossed around the idea of looking up the values, but weren’t very sure where to get them. I think I have an answer.


The registry contains a couple of useful values under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BizTalk Server\3.0\Administration. BizTalkAdminNTGroup – well, there you go right there; one down, one to go. Let’s use MgmtDbServer and MgmtDbName to create a SQL connection. Let’s use the value from BizTalkGroupName to query the adm_Groups table for the GroupID. Then let’s query the adm_Host table for that GroupID and Name = “BizTalkServerApplication”. The NTGroupName is the value we need to plug into SSOAppConfig.


While I’m dreaming, I want to add command line parameters to the tool so that I can script out installs (using Import) and uninstalls (using Delete).