After many (many) technical and licensing discussions, my current client is moving forward to BizTalk 2006 from BizTalk 2004. We’re excited to finally be able to dump the last SQL Server 2000 and VS.NET 2003 installs and go pure-2.0.
That said, I’ve been busy with BTS 2004 to 2006 upgrades and new installs lately. I found that BizTalk 2006 requires MMC (Microsoft Management Console) 3.0 — but the new and improved BTS installer doesn’t appear to check for it, nor does it install it if you don’t have it! After installing 2006, I tried to open some of the BizTalk MMC snap-ins and was informed that I didn’t have MMC 3.0. Hmm… so much for the dependency checker and automatic download and install of “all” of the software prerequisites. It’s still better than 2004, but how could they miss this??
Save yourself a few minutes and just install MMC 3.0 beforehand. There are different installers for each OS variant, so you can search Microsoft Downloads for “MMC 3.0” to find what you need. This search link might get you there quicker.
[5/18/06 Update] – Evidentally the Enterprise SSO Admin snap-in is the only one that requires MMC 3.0, so you can get away with 2.0 for most of your tasks. However, I’d still advise upgrading to 3.0 to avoid the day when you need that snap-in, the server is in production, you can’t open it, you can’t restart the server, and you throw the keyboard across the room in frustration!
