Additional components

Previous  Top  Next

In this chapter, the additional components that need to be available for a Metatude installation are explained.


An SMTP Server

The MDS sends out e-mails to stakeholders. It does this by connecting to your SMTP server, just as any normal e-mail client does. You can use any SMTP server for this purpose.


A Web Server

The webserver is used to serve the dialogues to stakeholders. On the webserver, a web application, called the Metatude Channel Integration Component (MCIC) must be installed. Components are available for:

·	Microsoft IIS server 4, 5 and 6

·	Apache Tomcat 4.1 or any other Java Servlet Container

The MCIC connects to the MDS using SOAP. On the MCIC, you can configure the hostname and the port number of the MDS.The default port for the MDS is 6832. Please see the Metatude Channel Integration Components Installation Manual for more details.


A Database

The MDS stores the results of the surveys in a database. Any of the following databases can be used:

·	Oracle 8i, Oracle 9i

·	Microsoft SQL Server 2000

·	IBM DB2 version 8.1

·	PostgreSQL 7.3

The MDS connects to any of these databases using TCP/IP. Before you install the MDS, you need to create an empty database and a database user that can be used by the MDS for storing and retrieving results. You can also use a database user that is already available.

Please use any of the following character encodings in the empty database:

·

UTF-8

·

UCS-2

·	ISO-8859-1

If the database you have created uses UTF-8 as encoding, Unicode support will be enabled throughout the Metatude installation. If you use ISO-8859-1 as the encoding for your database, Unicode support will not be available. When you use a SQL Server database, automatically, UCS-2 encoding is selected and Unicode support is available.

After the MDS is configured, it creates a set of tables in the empty database. The MDS uses these for storing settings and other information. Each time a project or directory server is created, new tables are created in the database.


A Directory server

The stakeholder information is retrieved from a directory server or from a database. After you have installed the MDS, you can configure these with the MPM. Additional manuals on the Metatude CD-ROM describe how to connect to various directory servers. You can use any of the following sources to retrieve stakeholder information:

·	Microsoft Exchange 5.5

·	Microsoft Active Directory

·	Lotus Notes Domino Server

·	Netscape Directory Server

·	Novell eDirectory

·	Any LDAP server

·	Any database

The MDS connects to these sources using TCP/IP. For any of the above mentioned sources, exept the database, the LDAP protocol is used. You can use multiple directory servers at the same time.