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.