Delivering help content from an intranet server
You can set up an intranet server behind a firewall to provide
help content to users. In this way, users do not have to download and save
help content to their computers. Depending on your security requirements and
organizational needs, you can provide help content to users from an intranet
server. This arrangement frees up disk space on users' computers, because
one copy of the help content is stored on a server. You can also make sure
that all users have the latest help content from IBM® with a single update to the intranet
server.
Providing help content on an intranet server requires deploying the
enterprise help.WAR application on the server. You must have an application
server for this purpose.
See
Installation Manager information center for the updated
instructions on setting up an intranet server for help content.
Because
each enterprise is different, an example shows the procedures of setting up
the application server and deploying the help.WAR application. For this example,
the procedures show how to deliver help content with the open-source Apache
Tomcat Application Server. The basic procedure applies to all servers; the
specifics for your server might vary. Review the deployment instructions for
your application server.
This example uses Apache Tomcat 6.0. You can
download the server application from http://tomcat.apache.org.
Note: Apache Tomcat 6.0 requires the Java™ 2
Standard Edition (J2SE) Runtime Environment (JRE), version 5.0 or later.
To
set up the Apache Tomcat Application server for providing help content:
- Download and install according to the included instructions the
J2SE JRE: http://java.sun.com/j2se.
Note: You can also use the full JDK rather than just the JRE. In this
case set your JAVA_HOME environment variable to the path name of the directory
into which you installed the JDK. For example, use one of these environment
variables: setc:\j2sdk5.0 or /usr/local/java/j2sdk5.0.
- Set an environment variable named JRE_HOME to the pathname of the
directory into which you installed the JRE. For example, set one of these
environment variables: c:\jre5.0 or /usr/local/java/jre5.0.
- Unpack the binary distribution files into a convenient location
so that the distribution is located in its own directory, which is typically
named apache-tomcat-version. For
the purposes of the remainder of this document, the name $CATALINA_HOME is
used to refer to the full path name of the release directory.
- Place the Help.WAR in the webapps folder: $CATALINA_HOME\webapps.
- Start Apache Tomcat by entering this command (Windows®): $CATALINA_HOME\bin\startup.bat. After startup, the default Web applications that Apache Tomcat includes
are available at this address: http://localhost:8080/.
- After you open the startup page, you can access the help system
by adding help/index.jsp to the end of your URL: http://localhost:8080/help/index.jsp.
- To enable your users to access the help content from your application
server, provide the users with the server, the port, and the path to the help
system.
- With this information available, users start the workbench, and
then click .
- Users select the Help preferences, expand it, and select Include
help content from a remote infocenter, and then click Add.
- Users type the server name, host, path, and port in the appropriate
fields, and then click OK.
- To obtain updated user assistance, navigate to the update window
and follow the installation and update instructions there: http://localhost:8080/help/updater/updatewar.jsp
- To update the help content, you must clear the cache. Otherwise,
updates are not reflected in the browser. Perform these steps to clear the
cache in preparation for an update:
- Shut down the Apache Tomcat application server by entering this
command: $CATALINA_HOME\bin\shutdown.bat.
- Navigate to the $CATALINA_HOME\work\Catalina\localhost directory,
and delete the help folder, which contains your uncompressed Web application.
- Copy your new help.WAR file into the $CATALINA_HOME\webapps
folder, and restart the Apache Tomcat application server.