Personal Web Server Set Up Guide

You need three things to run Perception Server – webserver software (Personal Web Server), ODBC and a browser connected to the webserver.

For low volume or tryout use, you can use Microsoft’s Personal Web Server (PWS) on Windows 95, 98 or NT Workstation.

Perception Server accesses its database files via a technology called ODBC. Your server PC must also have ODBC installed, with a Microsoft Access driver of at least version 3.50. This may already be installed on your server. You can check this as follows:

Go to the Control Panel and see if there is a 32-bit ODBC or ODBC Data Sources (32bit) icon.

If there is one, click on it, and then click the Drivers or ODBC Drivers tab.

Check that there is a driver for Microsoft Access, and that its version is at least 3.50. (Can be found on the Perception Installation CD)

If you do not have this installed, or you want to consider upgrading your version, you should click on the Install ODBC option that appears when you put the Perception CD in your drive. Or else you can double click on the installodbc.html document in the Perception CD root directory. This offers you the choice of installing ODBC from the CD or else checking the Microsoft website to see if there is a later version to install.

In order to check that you have installed Perception Server successfully, you will need a browser on a PC with a connection to your webserver. Although you can use parts of Perception Server with an earlier model browser, for full use you need Internet Explorer version 4 or higher, or Netscape Navigator/Communicator version 4 or higher.

You install Perception Server by choosing the option to do so on the menu that appears when you put the Perception CD in your drive. Or else, you run the server.exe program from the CD root directory. On a Windows NT system, you may need administrative privileges to successfully install the software.

The software will ask you for the directory that you want to install Perception in. The default directory is c:\perception , but you can set another directory name if you choose. Whatever directory you choose must be accessible to the webserver software. The self-installing program will copy all the files needed for Perception Server into the directory you have chosen, and make the necessary subdirectories for you.

If you are installing the authoring and server software on the same PC, you can choose to put them in the same or different directories, as you wish.

The install program will make your Perception databases accessible via ODBC, by allocating them an ODBC System DSN . If you have installed Perception Server before on the same PC, it will check that you want to overwrite any previous DSNs before doing so. If so, you may see the following message:

If you don’t care about any existing installation of Perception, click Yes. If you are not sure, click No. If you click No or get any error messages regarding ODBC installation, you will have to set up your ODBC settings manually as described in section Setting up ODBC manually

You now need to tell your webserver that some of the Perception directories are to be accessible over the web. To do this, you have to tell the webserver that the web URL name qm maps onto the directory in which you have installed perception.dll .

Run Windows Explorer, and right-mouse click on the directory you want to share (for example c:\perception\server ) and choose Properties .

Select the Web Sharing tab. If there is no such tab, then check your webserver is started.

Click on Share this folder . This brings up a dialog that asks you to enter the name of the share name or alias, and to set the permissions. Set these according to the table above.

You need to repeat this for each of the three directories as shown in the table above.

If you have problems following this approach, you can also share directories under Personal Web Manager.

Perception Server’s usage is controlled by a license file. This controls your system serial number, the number of participants you are permitted to store in the security database and the message displayed at the bottom of each Perception Server screen. You cannot change the license file yourself. They are issued at your Question Mark office, and if you need a different one, you must contact your local office.

License files are usually stored in the same directory as the program DLL files ( \perception\server), but you can change which directory is used in perception.ini if you need to.

Perception Server ships with a license file called license.lic, which allows default use with a limited number of participants. This license file may expire 30 days after installation. When you purchase Perception, you should be sent either by email or on disk, your own license file. This will have the .lic extension, but may have a different name to license.lic . When you receive this file:

If the server software is running, restart or reset it. See section Resetting for more information about resetting.

You can then check Perception Server works by running a browser and trying to access it. The URL to the programs will be the URL to your server plus /QM

For example, if your server is www.xyzcompany.com then the URL to perception.dll will be

http://www.xyzcompany.com/QM/perception.dll . If you are running the software with a browser on the same PC as the server, you can usually access the server with the special URL of http://localhost/QM/perception.dll. The use of localhost tells the browser to look for a server running on the local machine.

The program that participants will usually run to take sessions is perception.dll. You can try running this. Login with name test. Leave the password box blank. You should be able to run the Welcome to Perception session.

The name of the Security Manager program is security.dll . If you run this, login as Manager with password Secret (case sensitive). You can change this password from the Admin area within the software.

The third program you can run is an open access program called open.dll. If you run this, you will see a list of all sessions in the session database. You are asked for a name, but can type in anything as it's not checked.

And then you can run Enterprise Reporter. You can log in to this from program login.asp in the enterprise subdirectory. So for example, you might run it as http://www.xyzcompany.com/enterprise/login.asp . You can use the Security Manager name and password to get into this. The starting answer database is blank, so you'll need to answer some sessions before there is anything to see.

Perception Server installs the following files, all as subdirectories of the master directory chosen on installation (by default c:\perception):

This directory (usually called server ) is where the main Perception Server programs are run from, and usually contains these files:

perception.dll is the secure entry point for participants into Perception Server.

session.dllis the part of Perception Server that actually delivers the session. Either perception.dll or open.dll chooses which session to run, and then passes this onto session.dll to run it.

license.lic is a license file that controls use of Perception Server. This contains the serial number of your software, and some other important information about your configuration. The software will not run without a license file. A starting version of this file is created during installation. When you purchase the software, you will be sent your own license file (usually with a different name), and you need to copy it to this directory and reset the server DLLs. See section Adding your license file

This directory (usually called enterprise ) contains all the files used by Enterprise Reporter, including some in subdirectories. The main files accessed directly are:

login.asp is the main entry point into the reporting software for most users.

If access to reporting is set up not to require secure login, then index.asp can be used as an entry point.

settings.asp contains some settings for Enterprise Reporter, that you can be changed.

about.asp is a file which can be called either directly or from Enterprise Reporter to give version and other system information.

These system DLLs needed by Perception Server are also copied to your Windows system directory:

mfc42.dll and msvcrt.dll are Microsoft DLLs needed by all parts of Perception Server. The installation software will copy these into your Windows system directory, replacing any less up-to-date versions. If your system already contains a more up-to-date version of these DLLs, they will not be updated.

These settings define the ODBC System DSN names for the four main server databases. With the above settings, the software looks, for example, for a session database with the ODBC name of QMPSession. You can change these if you want to use different ODBC names, see

With ODBC, programs reference databases using Data Source Names (DSNs). These are translated into physical databases by the ODBC management system. For example, Perception Server finds the answer database by using a DSN called QMPAnswer. It doesn’t need to know where the physical file is. However, the ODBC system does need to know this, i.e. that the physical file is called qmpanswer.mdb , and is stored in directory c:\perception\databases .

Usually the install program automatically sets up these DSNs for you. But if there are problems in installing, or if you have more than one copy of Perception Server on the PC, you may need to set these up manually. You need to set up five connections, as follows:

Data Source Name	File Name
QMPAnswer	qmpanswer.mdb
QMPEnterprise	qmpenterprise.mdb
QMPSecurity	qmpsecurity.mdb
QMPQuestion	library.question
QMPSession	master.session

Run the ODBC Data Sources (32bit) or 32-bit ODBC icon from the Control Panel.

In the following dialog, set the Data Source Name (e.g. QMPAnswer), a description (any text, e.g. QM Database , and use the Select button to browse for the database file name (e.g. qmpanswer.mdb).

For the question and session databases (the last two settings), you will need to list files of all type in the browse dialog to find the .question and .session files to connect to. These are Access databases but do not use the .MDB extension. Do not make any settings in the System Database area; leave this as None .

When you are finished the System DSN dialog should look similar to the following screen:

If you change the DSN names used by Perception, you will need to change the configuration files to let Perception know of the change. You should change perception.ini as explained in section Changing perception.ini , and change the reporting settings.asp as explained in section Configuring Enterprise Reporter

In case you need this information, here is which of the different components of Perception Server access which of the databases:

The security database is accessed by security.dll , perception.dll, open.dll, session.dll,and Enterprise Reporter.

The session database is accessed by security.dll , perception.dll, open.dll and session.dll.

If you have any problems setting up Microsoft Personal Web Server contact Michael Rowland.