Getting Pulse into Production

MadCap Pulse is the only documentation-centric social collaboration platform that enables technical authors to create a complete social layer around their documentation in order to connect, collaborate and share knowledge with authors, employees and customers.
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LeslieT
Propeller Head
Posts: 40
Joined: Fri Feb 29, 2008 11:32 am

Getting Pulse into Production

Post by LeslieT »

Does anyone have any experience that they can share with getting a Pulse server into production? What was the timeline and what tasks were involved from planning to implementation? I am trying to put something together for management that will outline this process and provide some time and resource estimates.
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Leslie T.

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chunkee
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 121
Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 1:52 pm

Re: Getting Pulse into Production

Post by chunkee »

LeslieT wrote:Does anyone have any experience that they can share with getting a Pulse server into production? What was the timeline and what tasks were involved from planning to implementation? I am trying to put something together for management that will outline this process and provide some time and resource estimates.
Hi Leslie,
I am getting ready to implement into production on our own servers. It is replacing Feedback Server. I did have experience during the beta on our staging server. Look over the installation and configuration guide with your IT dept to get an idea on time.

You will need licenses for the Web Server and SQL server unless you are using SQL Express. Configuration is not that straight forward and you will need an account to be able to access the database. The database stores meta data and cleartext content,
any of the uploaded documents and images etc, are stored on a hard drive.

Send me message and I can provide for you my contact information if you like.

Hope this helps,
John C
Ineffable
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 148
Joined: Mon Jan 15, 2007 3:08 pm
Location: Bay Area, CA

Re: Getting Pulse into Production

Post by Ineffable »

LeslieT wrote:Does anyone have any experience that they can share with getting a Pulse server into production? What was the timeline and what tasks were involved from planning to implementation? I am trying to put something together for management that will outline this process and provide some time and resource estimates.
I got it working. Took me a couple of hours, plus a support call to iron out an issue, which was fixed by a Pulse update shortly thereafter.

I used a virtual server on Rackspace, which allowed to manage the entire thing from installation to beta testing without having to deal with my oft-hesitant IT department. Installed a Windows Server installation with SQL, and was off and running. When I was finished, deleted the virtual server, paid the bill (was somewhat costly, but worth it for beta testing), and it was done.

This was a few months ago, so I don't recall the details, but the installation and configuration were straightforward.

One thing I didn't like was the limited ability to change the look and feel of the Pulse interface. Additionally, my WebHelp system is locked behind a login and I want the login for my system to be mirrored with the Pulse system so that users don't have to login twice. There is a user import function, where you can upload a CSV file of your user list after exporting from Oracle (in my case), but the Pulse system doesn't import passwords, so users would have to create a new password if they want to use Pulse.

Also, it's expensive--my instance would cost the company a lot due to the need for me to have thousands of users right off the bat (due to the Oracle user download), a lot of whom might not ever use the system. The inverse approach would be to simply have the user create an account on an as-needed basis, but I don't want to place this burden on my users, although it would organically cure and maintain the number of registered (read: paid) users. And this is even with my company hosting the service. The per-user approach seems outdated, given the other options out there (although not as integrated). We've looked at Atlassian Confluence, too, as well as Typo3, which is free. Again, not as elegant, so Pulse has an edge in that department.
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