Installation

I won’t go into great detail about the exact steps because that is outlined well in the installation guide. Note that I am writing this blog post simultaneously with the steps in the installation guide while doing the installation on the server.  So I will be writing more about the steps I went through to get everything installed and working (hopefully).  This section isn’t a guide but a walkthrough of me installing it for the first time with lessons learned.

Details about my Maximo 7.5 installation is as follows:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008
• IBM WebSphere Application Server
  • Single instance of Maximo 7.5 using the OOTB demo data (No LDAP)
  • Microsoft SQL Server Database (running on a separate server)

I know that Maximo Anywhere doesn’t support MS SQL Server, but I will try to follow the installation guide and see what happens when I try to install it.

I will install it in a development environment in a single server deployment.  Remember that Maximo by default uses port 9080.  I have read that the Worklight Server also uses port 9080 as it’s default port for you to access the console.  Let’s see what happens…

Required Components

The first step to installing Maximo Anywhere is installing the Maximo Integration Framework with OSLC components as well as the enablement component.  When you run the “launchpad.exe” as administrator, it will first ask you where your default location is for your Maximo application.  By default this is the “C:/IBM/SMP” directory on Windows.  The installer will verify that it meets the minimum requirements.

In the next step, it will as you what languages you want to add, so apparently you can also localize Maximo Anywhere.

Next, it asks if you want to defer any of the installation options such as deferring the database update, or deploy the application files manually later.   I will keep all these unchecked, and have the installer do everything for me now, so I won’t defer anything.

So let’s go…

Ok, so on the first pass, I get an error saying that the “Maximo server is running”.  It came up pretty quickly, so no problem.  Let’s stop it and try again…

Great, everything seems good so it will now do the full install before confirming all your installation settings.  Now it’s just a matter of time to let it do its thing.

There are a total of 14 tasks…

Task 13 takes the longest, so after about an hour wait, the installation completes.

Round 1

Next installation task is to install the Anywhere application.  It includes to applications that can be installed separately to mobile applications, IBM Anywhere Work Execution and IBM Anywhere Work Approval.

In this step, I will install Maximo Anywhere, Worklight Server and Worklight Studio.  The Worklight Server is required to install Maximo Anywhere.  Worklight Studio is optional and only needed to configure and build applications.

From the launch pad, you click install but it actually runs another installer called “IBM Installation Manager”

The first thing it does is try to find all the installation files.  For me, it complained that it cannot find the Worklight Studio installation files.  It doesn’t have any instructions on where to find these files or what downloads these install files would be in.  Also, I have already downloaded all the files I needed for this install so it should be here somewhere.

Now I’m kinda stuck… with no documentation anywhere (get it?) about this…

After about 15 minutes of looking around the install files and moving things around, I finally found the right files and placed them in the right directories.

When you download the installation files for Maximo Anywhere, you should have also downloaded a ZIP file named “IBM_MAXIMO_ANYWHERE_V7.5.0”, which contains the Launchpad executable for the steps above that we completed earlier.  You should also have downloaded these, which are required to install Worklight Server and Worklight Studio:

• IM_Rep_Worklight_Server_wce_5.0.6
• IM_Rep_Worklight_Studio_wce_5.0.6

When you extract the contents of these two, you will see two directories, “Worklight” and “IWS” respectively.  You need to copy these directories into the “IBM_MAXIMO_ANYWHERE_V7.5.0” directory.  Basically you need to copy them in the same directory where you ran the “launchpad.exe”.  These steps are undocumented so it’s up to you to figure it out.

Now, you can click “Next” to install, but now you actually get another validation warning because it can’t find the right install files again… Click “Previous” and click the button “Check for Other Versions, Fixes, and Extensions”.  You have to login with your IBM username/password.  As of this writing, the version 5.0.6 is outdated and was updated to version 5.0.6.1.  Once those are updated, you can now continue to install.

The IBM Installation Manager now downloads more files, so make sure you have enough disk space to handle up to 4 GB of installation files.

Now I still get a validation warning, saying to stop everything.  Just click “Next”.  Eventually you will get to a screen for you to setup all your URL settings and more.  I just realized that I cannot continue until I install the Android SDK…

So let’s do that…

This is only a prerequisite if you want to install the Worklight Studio.  If you don’t, skip this step.

Download the android SDK and install it.  Now understand that when you install the SDK, it actually installs into the directory that you extracted zip file in.  In my case, it’s in the “C:\Android SDK\adt-bundle-windows-x86-20131030\sdk”.  It was kind of confusing trying to find out where it actually installed to.  Moving on…

Next, it asks what database you want to use for the Worklight Server.  This is good because I have MS SQL Server and that’s not supported.  Because I don’t have any of the other databases, I chose to use the Derby database even though it’s not production ready (I’m only installing this on a DEV server).

Then it will ask for you the application server and since I am installing this on an out of the box Maximo 7.5 instance that comes with WebSphere, I chose to just let the installer create the Liberty profile for me.

Now click “Install” to begin the Worklight installation process.

The installs takes about an hour to complete.  So now it seems like I can access the Worklight console via http://localhost:9080/worklight/console.

Nope… I cannot access the console.  By default, the Worklight console uses port 9080 for its port but keep in mind that my single server Maximo 7.5 instance is also using port 9080.  So I’m not surprised that it doesn’t work.  When I did the install, I choose to use the WebSphere Application Server Liberty profile, so I’m not sure exact what it created or how, but it seems like using that option doesn’t work for my setup.  The installation doesn’t give you the option to change the default port number either.

So after about 20 minutes of poking around and trying to get it to work, I decided to start over.  Now I have to give credit to IBM, because the uninstall process is actually pretty good.  In the documentation, you can simply use the IBM Installation Manager to uninstall everything, so I uninstalled Maximo Anywhere, Worklight Server and Worklight Studio.  To my surprise, it actually uninstalled it and it did very quickly in about 5 minutes.