A few installation tips

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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jlockerby
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:05 pm

A few installation tips

Post by jlockerby »

While the Pulse board looks pretty dormant, I'm hoping there are a few people out there I can help with this!

Like a lot of people here, we had quite the struggle when it came to getting Pulse installed and working on our servers, and it took us well over a month of back-and-forth with the support team before finally got it working. Some of the issues were things that Madcap does have documented and we missed or couldn't find, but others didn't seem to be documented anywhere. I'd like to list out some of the setup things that tripped us up for so long and how we resolved them, in hopes that the information helps someone else. This does come with the disclaimers that this isn't a complete walkthrough by any means, and that my IT department (not me) handled all the details here and many of the specific settings came right from them, so I'm afraid I may have limited knowledge to answer follow up questions!

Our biggest issues and resolutions:

-You need to follow the instructions in their guide EXACTLY. Pulse won't work with any newer versions of Windows Server or SQL than the older stuff that they say they support - we tried it all just in case!

-Make sure to set the URL you want your admin dashboard to be at during installation - you can't change it later without uninstalling and reinstalling the app. If this is mismatched, admin users won't be able to create their accounts and login. (The system will send a "sign up" email with a link to create the account, but the link will be to the default URL. That default URL will give an error, and if users try to put in the correct URL instead they seem to get an error when they get to the final step of trying to create their account.)

-You need to have TLS 1.0 turned on for your load balancer / proxy. THIS WAS OUR BIGGEST AND HARDEST TO RESOLVE SETUP ISSUE. Without this, we were continually getting an error telling us we were unauthorized to view data, and although we could get to the reports they were blank. (This was an issue we stumbled onto the answer for ourselves - it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere and few hours on calls with support didn't get this one fixed.)

-And finally, a few settings on IIS that we needed enabled to get through the initial setup process. We added Application Development under Web Server and checked all but CGI, ASP, and Server Side Includes (since we had no classic ASP). We also installed Windows Identity foundation from the features menu. I'm not sure if these settings are documented and we just missed them (very possible) or if they are not on the regular documentation, but support helped us out with this list.

Hope this can help someone out through the same process!
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