Installing the software on your platform

The initial release of Social Office is available as a bundle from Liferay. You should have received either a cross-platform .zip file or a Windows executable file. In either case, you'll find that installing Social Office is simple and straightforward.

Using the Windows Installer

Illustration 4: The Social Office Windows installerSimply double-click on the installer you have received and the installation will begin. A standard installer will appear and ask you where you want to install the software. The default is C:\Liferay, but you can change this to whatever path you wish. Once the installer is finished, Social Office is immediately available—there's no need to reboot. After the installation, you'll find a new group in your Windows Start Menu for Social Office. To start Social Office, simply click on Start. That's it! To stop Social Office, click on Stop. (see illustration 5). Note that this particular default install is useful only for demo and evaluation purposes: it uses an embedded database which is great for getting up and running quickly. If you want to configure Social Office for production use, please see the section below on connecting it to an enterprise database.

Illustration 5: Starting and Stopping Social OfficeBecause Social Office is a browser-based application, it starts up as a web server process on your machine. For this reason, you'll see a window pop up and display some messages before your browser launches to view Social Office. This is normal and to be expected. Please do not close this box! When it has finished starting, your browser will launch automatically so that you can log into Social Office.

Using the Cross-Platform Zip File

If you're running an operating system other than Windows, you can use the cross-platform .zip file to install Social Office. The one prerequisite is that Java is installed properly. Install Java and make sure that your JAVA_HOME environment variable is pointing to the location of your JDK. Once this is done, simply extract the .zip file to the location of your choice, and then Social Office can be launched via scripts from the command line.

The same caveats apply to the .zip distribution as apply to the Windows installer: the default install is useful only for demo and evaluation purposes because it uses an embedded database. While this database is great for getting up and running quickly, it doesn't perform well in production environments where many users access the system. For this reason, when you're ready to configure Social Office for production use, please see the section below on connecting it to an enterprise database.

To start Social Office, launch the script that's found in the [Social Office Folder]/tomcat-[version]/bin folder, where [Social Office Folder] is the top level folder extracted from the .zip file.

You can use the following command on Linux / Mac / Unix to start Social Office:

./startup.sh

Social Office will then launch.

Similarly, to stop Social Office use this command:

./shutdown.sh

Windows systems also have the same start and stop scripts, found in the same folder. To start Social Office on Windows, use this command:

startup

And to stop it, use this command:

shutdown

If you're on Linux, Unix, or Mac, you can see the Tomcat console by issuing the following command:

tail -f ../logs/catalina.out

Once Social Office has completed its startup, it will automatically launch a web browser so you can see the home page. If this doesn't happen, launch your web browser and then go to the following address: http://localhost:8080. The default Social Office login page will appear in your web browser. Now you're ready to explore the various features of Social Office!