My first tidbit.
A recurring issue that pops up with the BAM feature is that of the locale/culture setting. BAM is made up of a number of separate components, SQL, web services, custom tools, and more. In order for each of the components to operate together effectively, they must all be set to the same locale/culture. In addition, your system and user locale/culture should match those set for BAM.
For example, Suppose you are using a Russian deployment of Excel and you create a BAM definition that contains Russian strings for field names and deploy this definition to a BizTalk Server installation that is using US-English.
When the user navigates to the portal and view date/times or sorted lists. The Russian strings will sort with the US-English collation order and dates will be input and displayed using US-English rules.
To address this you can change the BAMPortal\Web.config file, by modifying the culture attribute under the <globalization> tag.
<globalization requestEncoding=”utf-8″ responseEncoding=”utf-8″ culture=”ru-RU” uiCulture=”en” />
Another instance where this can be a problem changing the system or user locale. Say you install Windows Server 2003, English edition and change the system locale to Dutch/Belgium. You then install Microsoft Office 2003 without the MUI packs. When you attempt to deploy a workbook containing BAM definition you will receive the following error:
C:\myBAM>bm deploy-all -definitionfile:TCM119292-result.xls
Microsoft (R) Business Activity Monitoring Utility Version 3.5.1535.0
Copyright (C) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Using ‘BAMPrimaryImport’ BAM Primary Import database on server ‘KW0083’…
ERROR: Failed to open BAM Excel workbook file – ‘C:\ myBAM \TCM119292-result.xls’.
Old format or invalid type library. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80028018 (TYPE_E_INVDATAREAD))
To deploy the workbook, change you locale back to English and redeploy the workbook.