BAM Deployment: Alerts not deployed

I’ve just trouble-shot this error as well, and I couldn’t find it elsewhere on the Internet, so I thought I’d add it for posterity.

The error, when deploying a BAM Business Activity using bm.exe is:

Deploying Activity... Done.
Deploying View... Done.
Deploying Alert... ERROR: The BAM deployment failed.The alerts were not deployed.
The system cannot find the file specified

Maybe the reason no-one else has it is just because I have a weird setup! I have a dedicated BizTalk server, a separate SQL Server, and an administration machine. Originally I ran bm.exe on the BizTalk server, but it complained because I didn’t have Office installed so it couldn’t read the .xls files. Fine. So I deployed it on my administration machine, which is where I created the Business Activity in the first place, and which does have Office installed. That’s what caused the error above.

So, it looks like you have to install Excel on your BizTalk server. Which is a bit… nasty. I’m sure you could get away with just some Interop files, but unless Microsoft packages them up into a ‘BizTalk Server Office Integration Package” MSI, who is going to do that? So, I threw a copy of Office onto the machine, and hey-presto, it works.