For as many times as I have set up BizTalk you would think I have seen it all.  But the sad truth is that I run into a unique problem each and every time.

This time, I had some initial issues getting even the SSO up-and-running but I had forgotten some of the basics (disabling shared memory, etc.).  Then I had some spelling mistakes in the group names (sloppy on my part) and then I forgot to add myself to one of the groups (again, sloppy).  Finally, I had most of these housekeeping items taken care of and then get the SSO up.

Next, when I tried to set up the Group feature I kept getting a “logon failed” for the BizTalkRuleEngineDB.  But … there was no BizTalkRuleEngineDb … and I was a sysadmin on SQL.  WTF?!?

Well … as it turns out the very first time I had attempted to configure BizTalk the Rules Engine configuration had actually succeeded.  However, I went in and deleted the existing databases when I was trying to get the SSO up-an-running.  BizTalk thought there should have been a rules engine database and was failing trying to “log in” to it.

To fix it, I unconfigured the Rules Engine feature and everything went smoothly going forward.  Would have been nice to get a “database ain’t there” error message!