BizTalk 2010 - Using external source for credentials

Question

On my BizTalk server I use several different credentials to connect to internal and external systems. There is an upcoming task to change the passwords for a lot of systems and I'm searching for a solution to simplify this task on my BizTalk server.

Is there a way that I could adjust the File/FTP adapters to extract the information from an XML file so that I can change it only in the XML file and everything will be updated or is there an alternative that I could use such as PowerShell?

Did someone else had this task as well?

I rather don't want to create a custom adapter but if there is no alternative I will go for that one. Using dynamic credentials for the send port can be solved with Orchestration but I need this as well for the receive port.

Answer 1

You can export the bindings of all your applications. All the passwords for the FTP and File Adapter will be masked out with a series off * (asterisks). You could then edit your binding down to just those ports you want to update, replace the masked out passwords with the correct passwords, and when you want the passwords changed, import them.

Unfortunately unless you have already prepared tokenised binding files the above is a manual effort.

Answer 2

I was going to recommend that you take a look at Enterprise Single Sign-On, but on second thoughts, I think you probably just need to 'bite the bullet' and make the change in the various Adapters.

ESSO would be beneficial if you have a single Adapter with multiple endpoints/credentials, but I infer from your question that isn't the case (i.e. you're not just using a single adapter). I also don't think re-writing the adapters to include functionality to read usernames/passwords from file is feasible IMHO - just changing the passwords would be much faster, by an order of weeks or months ;-)

One option that is available to you however, depending on which direction the adapter is being used: if you need to change credentials on Send Adapters, you should consider setting usernames/passwords at runtime via the various Adapter Property Schemas (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560564.aspx for the FTP Adapter Properties for example). You could then easily create an encoding Send Pipeline Component that reads an Xml file containing credentials and updates the message context properties accordingly, the message would then be send with the appropriate credentials to the required endpoint.

There is also the option of using ESSO as your (encrypted) config store instead of Xml files / database etc. Richard Seroter has a really good post on this from way back in 2007 (its still perfectly valid tho.)