Installation tips & tricks for LiveCycle ES “next” beta

The LiveCycle turnkey installer keeps making things easier for a developer to get started. Since the beta of the next version of LiveCycle is available to download for review I thought i’d share some advice on the install process.

LiveCycle is enterprise software, so you need to give it the same respect that you would if you were installing Seibel, SAP, Oracle or other large systems. What I mean by this is dont skimp on hardware.. give it a decent CPU and decent amount of ram (more on that in a moment) and heed the system requirements.

One thing I see happen all the time is that developers waste a lot of time trying to install LiveCycle into “their” environment, ie they neglect the turnkey install and spend many hours trying to bend LC into shape. Adobe’s engineers have spent quite a bit of time certifying roughly 65 combinations of operating system, database & app server, so there must be something to suit your needs, although my recommendation for kicking the tires is just to install the turnkey and start playing in less than an hour!

RAM – Seriously, if you are going to install all the various components of LiveCycle, be aware that they all take a slice of not just your system ram, but the more precious Java memory.It is quite easy to run out of Java Heap Space if running all the LiveCycle components on a 32 bit JVM, so run 64 bit Java if possible!

The new installer adds a new feature that streamlines the configuration of SSL on the turnkey JBoss install. SSL needs to be configured in order to use Rights Management securely. A lot of people get scared by this but here is a tip..

Simply enter the DNS name of your testing machine into the Common Name field. In my case I’ve installed on a VMWare image and I connect to my installation at the address vm.globalcorp.com.au even when connecting locally.

After the installer is complete, navigate to this folder;

C:<LiveCycleInstallPathjbossserverlc_turnkeyconf

and double click on “lces.cer”. You will be prompted to install the certificate. Do so, then navigate to the same address you put in the Common name field during the install (like my vm.globalcorp.com.au). Try the same address now with https://yourdnsname:8443

The installer has many new “checks” during the install to make sure you get things correctly setup, so take the time to read the erros if they show up. For instance, you need to have Acrobat installed if you intend to use the PDF Generator features, so the installer will check that Acrobat is correctly installed and visible to LiveCycle.

Finally, if you are looking for the deploy folder, the turnkey installer deploys to a new “lc_turnkey” server definition now instead of “all”

Have any extra tips for installing LiveCycle?  Add them to the comments!