Part 7. Wrap up

Part 7. Wrap up

Up to this point we've been using completely free software and have a basic deployment of MicroStrategy setup.  Unfortunately, that ends here.  Which non-free piece of software am I talking about?  Microsoft Windows.  In order to really do some serious MicroStrategy development, you need to be working on MicroStrategy Desktop.  Also, Desktop is the ideal place for most of the MicroStrategy Administration to maintain your environment.

Now, I'm not going to walk through the process of setting up MicroStrategy Desktop on Windows; it's seriously trivial.  You launch the Wizard, Next > Next > Next > Finish.  Quite straight forward, and not really worth a multi-step tutorial.  If help is needed, there are plenty of MicroStrategy resources to help in this basic setup in the knowledge base, or manuals.  There is no configuration trickery or gotchas that you really need to worry about.

I do want to note however, when you perform the Desktop installation, install the 'MicroStrategy Tutorial' component.  This will basically copy over an access Metadata and a 2-tier project source already created in Desktop, so you can browse around and take a look at a pre-built environment.  If you want to be really clever, right click on the 'MicroStrategy Tutorial' project and click 'Duplicate Project'.  You can duplicate this project into your new 3-tier Metadata to play with!  For most of my future tutorials covering development and SDK work, I'll probably be using this project to demo my examples.  The source data for these reports is in an Access database too, so I'm planning on doing a data migration from Access to a new PostgreSQL server, for a fully functional 3-tier environment.

Lastly, I want to mention that the purpose of this series was not necessarily explaining all the steps involved in creating a new deployable MicroStrategy environment.  Obviously there's a lot of things we didn't do yet; such as change the Administrator password, Activate the MicroStrategy installation, perform any server configuration optimization, etc.  The purpose was to deploy a full environment (minus Desktop!) on free software.  The VirtualMachine, OS, Database, Web Server, Application Server, Reporting Suite.. it's all free.  This serves as a great foundation for any hobbyest (MicroStrategy hobbyest??) to have a personal installation to test with.

Part 6. Setting up MicroStrategy Web Universal

Part 6. Setting up MicroStrategy Web Universal

So here are we, nearing the end of this series.  With all of the work we've done, we really still can't do anything with the system yet.  Even after this tutorial, you'll not be able to start doing any real work yet.  However, we are inching closer and closer, and it will all come together in the end.  In this tutorial, we're going to setup Apache and Tomcat, and deploy the MicroStrategy Web Universal environment.

First things first, let's go ahead and startup Tomcat if it's not already running.  Navigate to /usr/sbin and run:

mstradm@linux-las9:/usr/sbin> sudo ./rctomcat6 start

Starting Tomcat (/usr/share/tomcat6)                                                                                                                  done

At this point, Apache/Tomcat is now running on port 8080.  If you were to open a web browser and go to http://localhost:8080, you should just simply see a blank page (no errors.)

Next thing we need to do is setup our roles and users for Tomcat AND MicroStrategy administration.  Navigate to /usr/share/tomcat6/conf and sudo open tomcat-users.xml with your favorite text editor.  The default file should look like:

Out of the box, this file isn't really being used.  You can see, the <tomcat-users> node is commented out, so really this whole file is a big comment file.  Go ahead and uncomment the contents within <tomcat-users>

Next, let's add a couple of roles.  Namely, a 'manager' role for Tomcat Web Manager functionality, and 'admin' for MicroStrategy Web Administration functionality.  The syntax is simply <role rolename="role_name" />  Do this for the 'manager' and 'admin' roles.

Now that we have our roles created, let's create a new user for the MicroStrategy Web AND Tomcat administration.  I'm going to create the web user as 'mstr':

You can see after the 'roles' element, we're specifying tomcat, manager, and admin.  You can also see where we set the password.  Be sure to take note of this, we'll need it to log into the Tomcat WebApp Manager and MicroStrategy.  Also, take note of just how simple all of the passwords are.  This would be a good time to go ahead and change those to something a bit more complicated.  If further information is needed, there are plenty of resources on the web for setting up Tomcat security.

So after you finish making your tomcat-users.xml edits, save the file and restart tomcat:

mstradm@linux-las9:/usr/share/tomcat6/conf> sudo /usr/sbin/rctomcat6 restart

Shutting down Tomcat (/usr/share/tomcat6)

                                                                                                                                                      done

Starting Tomcat (/usr/share/tomcat6)                                                                                                                  done

Now open up a web browser from your openSUSE server, and go to http://localhost:8080/manager/html

From this WebApp Manager, we're going to deploy both MicroStrategy Web and Web Services.  Scroll down the WebApp Manager page to where you see "WAR file to deploy", and click 'Browse'.

Navigate to <install>/install/WebUniversal and you should see MicroStrategy.war.  Select that war file, and then click 'Deploy'.  This may take a few minutes, so if you don't see anything happening right away don't worry.  When the WebApp Manager is finished, you'll see it listed under 'Applications' and it should already be started.  Also at this time, if you want to deploy WebServices now's a good time to do it.  The deployment is exactly the same, however you'll use the MicroStrategyWS.war file from <install>/install/WebServicesJ2EE

As you can see, MicroStrategy Web was installed under /MicroStrategy which translates to http://localhost:8080/MicroStrategy .  Go ahead and click the /MicroStrategy path link.

Ah hah!  There's MicroStrategy Web is up and functional.  Click on the 'Web Administrator' link and enter the MicroStrategy user you defined in the tomcat-users.xml file.  You should be taken to the Web Administration page where you can now connect Web up to the Intelligence Server.

Now, simply add localhost into the 'Add a server manually' field and click Connect.

We're connected!  Unfortunately, that's about all that we can do at this point, as we don't actually have any projects built.  However, the foundation is now built and ready for some real work!

The next part in this series will be the last; and briefly cover connecting to your Intelligence Server with Desktop (from Windows) and getting started.