It can turn out to be useful to use Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) and the BizTalk Server Administration Console “remotely” (that is, from a machine other than one of the actual servers in the BizTalk group.)  This can be the case if you have multiple environments to administer, and/or using Remote Desktop is not desirable or available.

It should be noted that to accomplish this, you technically have to have the “administrating machine” join the BizTalk Group – though since you won’t have any host instances defined on the machine, that isn’t as significant as it sounds.  You are essentially just configuring the machine to point at a particular BizTalk management database, and configuring some WMI information.  The “administrating machine” does not appear in the “Servers” node of the BizTalk Administration Console.

It should also be noted that you will need to be in the “BizTalk Administrators” Windows group for the BizTalk environment you want to manage. 

To get started, the “administrator” should do an “Admin-only” install of BizTalk on the machine they will be using, where the installation options for BizTalk look like this:

Then, on the desktop, the administrator should put a shortcut to a script that looks like the script below.  This script simply reminds the user what BizTalk Group they are currently administrating, and confirms they want to switch:

If you select OK, you get another warning:

This is basically warning someone who has a full-blown BizTalk installation on their machine that they really don’t want to remove their current configuration unless they happen to have a saved configuration file from their last run of ConfigFramework.exe.

If you select OK, the “ConfigFramework.exe” utility is run (from BizTalk’s installation directory) with the /u switch, to remove the current configuration.  Afterwards, ConfigFramework.exe is run normally, and the only option you will have (for an admin-only install of BizTalk) is to select the database corresponding to the environment you wish to administer:

Once you hit “Next”, the wizard will complete, and you will be presented with a final confirmation dialog:

The VBScript as a text file is here.