BizTalk 2006 Easy Installation

I have just finished installing BizTalk 2006 on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1, one of the things that made BizTalk 2004 a real pain was its installation, however installing BizTalk 2006 is a real fun, and it’s straightforward, It’s kind of ( Next, Next, …, Finish ), If you have Internet connection it’s better to let the installation wizard to update all required components through the web, or if you plan to install it to other machine, you can download a cab file and reuse it everywhere else, actually I cannot forget how hard it was to install BizTalk 2004 prerequisites, which made me opt to use VHD image, and I used MS Virtual PC, now it's easy to get it up as the wizard provides a component updater and it's really a one click configuration, how simple !, however to create Groups and get started with BizTalk 2006, if you have SQL Server 2000, you should have SP4 installed to configure BizTalk 2006 from BizTalk Server Configuration.

You can select Basic Configuration and BizTalk Configuration will take after everything, it’s really simple!

You can download SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 from here, then you can select the components that most interest you.

After you select Basic Configuration if there is anything incorrect you will get one warning, also to make sure everything is fine, run BizTalk Server 2006 Administration Console; actually it's MMC, from left tree expand BizTalk Server 2006 Administration , then expand BizTalk Group[MachineName:BizTalkMgmtDb], expand Applications node, you will get 2 applications; BizTalk.System, and BizTalk Application 1; this assures that group has been created correctly.

Note: After installing BizTalk 2006 it creates 2 default applications first is BizTalk.System which contains all artifacts required to run built-in applications like Business Activity Services ( BAS ), also it contains some components that are part of BizTalk runtime which is required to each and every BizTalk application, second application is just a default application.