MicroStrategy mobile deployments consist of two components: the Mobile Server, a web service running on IIS in case of Windows, or on a Java Servlet container in case of *nix environments, and the mobile clients installed on iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, or Android.
The web service executes the reports and documents and serves the results in XML or JSON format, while the client takes care of the rendering, the prompts, the interactivity, and so on.
We start by configuring the web server part, which runs, in our case, on IIS 7.
For the following recipes to work, it is very important that we use a fixed IP address. If you're on a virtual machine, set the network card to be directly connected to the network (see in the screen capture the VMware network options):
Then assign a fixed IP address to your Windows server, ask your network administrator for details. I will be using 192.168.1.89 for the examples, so whenever you see this address, change it with your corresponding one.
We will also need to know the hostname of the Windows server, and this can be easily seen by typing hostname in a command prompt window.
With the IP address and the hostname we can open the Mobile Administrator:
- From Start | All Programs, go to MicroStrategy | Mobile | Mobile Server | Mobile Administrator. Click on Continue in the User Account Control window if it appears, and type the operating system account and password of the user
Administratorif prompted. - Internet Explorer will show the Administrator Page with the message No Intelligence Servers are currently connected.
- Click on the Add a server manually textbox and type the hostname of your Windows machine (in my case is
WIN-5KHTNPRO62T). - Click on the Add button. You will be presented with the Server Properties page. In Connect mode, check the option labeled Automatically connect to Intelligence Server when Mobile Server or Intelligence Server is restarted.
- Click on the Save button. Back on the Connected servers page, now you see that the server name of your machine appears in the list.
Mobile Server connects to Intelligence Server; in order to do that, it needs to know the name of the server definition we created in Chapter 1, Getting Started with MicroStrategy. By default, and if you followed all the recipes, this name is the same as the machine name of the Windows server.
Now that the Mobile Server is ready we need to set up the mobile connectivity. We'll do that in a minute, so unsheathe your iPad and read on.
By the way, I'm a little ashamed to say that I do not own an iPad. I borrowed one to do the tests.