BizTalk BAM Portal failure and configuration woes

Well … BizTalk just never fails to surprise me with the "one-thing-after-another" issues which I run into…

Symptom …

I did a fres BizTalk 2009 install on a virtual machine for some PoC deveopment … went to prepare a demo of BAM and the BAM Portal and when I hit the website it just failed with a generic message. Well … as is standard practice at this point it MUST have been something I did wrong … so I decided I needed to fix the issue by re-configuring the BAM Portal.

The First Try …

For some reason, I had the bright idea that I should delete the BAM Portal web applications and app pool before un-configuring. I did that, restarted IIS and ran the BizTalk configuration tool. Next, I un-configured the BAM Portal and completed the wizard … no problems, right? Of course not! When I went back into the BizTalk Configuration Tool to configure the BAM Portal feature the services accounts and website options were disabled!

The Second Try …

It turns out that the BAM database was still configured to point to the original website even though I had unconfigured that feature. So, according the this blog post I needed to use BM.exe to remove that configuration information.

The Fix…

Open the command prompt and find your way to BM.exe (Program FilesBizTalk …tracking)
Retrieve the current configuration information:
bm get-config -FileName:"BAM_Config.xml"
Update the config file to remove the reference to the current website:
<GlobalProperty Name="BAMVRoot">http://blah.blah.remove.this.URL</GlobalProperty>
Update the BAM configuration database:
bm update-config -FileName:"BAM_Config.xml"
Re-run the BizTalk Configuration Tool and re-configure the BAM Portal feature and you should be good to go

Conclusion…

Nothing in BizTalk is as it seems Wink