Planning the installation

Before you install IBM® Rational® Publishing Engine, make sure that you meet the installation prerequisites and that you understand how to install the product for your specific environment.
Important: Do not install more than one instance of Rational Publishing Engine on the same computer. If you do install more than one instance of Rational Publishing Engine on the same computer, the RPE_HOME environment variable might be affected which could result in the following issues:
  • Document generations from Rational DOORS® might fail because the DXL files and the .inc files might not match.
  • Microsoft Word macros might not run because the runmacro.vbs script and the rpe.dot macro files might require different arguments than the ones being issued.
  • HTML output might not be created because driver code might not be able to find the correct JavaScript files.

If you deploy the web app as part of the RPE Remote Services feature, you might not need the remote services applications, unless you need to connect directly to the desktop applications. Most of the tasks can be achieved via the new web app.

Rational Publishing Engine clients

Rational Publishing Engine provides the following clients for generating documents:
  • Document Studio: Report authors can use this stand-alone application to create templates that pull data from specified data sources. Document Studio creates document template archive files (.dta).
  • Launcher: You can generate documents from this stand-alone application. The Launcher configures template output and generates reports through document specification files (.dsx).

Additional components

When you install the Rational Publishing Engine clients, you have the option to install the following additional components:
  • Remote services:
    • 2.0 web app: Report designers can import templates created in Document Studio into the web app and connect them to data sources. End users can then generate documents with a single click without any knowledge of templates or data sources. You can also schedule document generation.
    • 1.x remote services application: You can relocate resource and time-consuming publishing operations to another computer or server by using the Remote document generation component contained in the Remote services application. The Remote services application also includes:
      • Central Management component: The Central Management component is a common asset storage system for accessing commonly used files in your organization.
      • Monitor & Control component: Administrators can use the Monitor & Control component administrative user interface to check the status of all document generation jobs that are requested from different clients to run remotely. The administrator can then help troubleshoot or cancel jobs, if necessary.
      • Report scheduler component: With the Report scheduler component, you can schedule remote document generation jobs at a specific time or interval.
  • Add-in: This add-in is available for IBM Rational DOORS integrations. You can use the add-ins to start publishing processes directly from Rational DOORS . If a valid installation of one of those products is found, the add-ins are automatically installed.

If you installed the remote applications and the Rational Publishing Engine clients on a server for remote document generation, the remote applications are ready to deploy on the application server when the installation is complete.

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