How to install Razordesk

Automatic Installer

Introduction

We supply an automatic installer that should, in most cases, allow you get up and running with Razordesk strauight away. However, owing to the miriad ways that Servers can be configured, in some situations some manual intervention may be required. It is recommended you try the auto installer in the first instance then fi you have trouble, see the manual installation instructions. It is not difficult, providing that you have a little knowledge of Internet Information Service (IIS) and Microsoft SQL Server.

We take pride in knowing that our system is out there helping people and we feel gutted to think someone gave up just because it didn't load first time, so any issues please get in touch (even for the free software).

To kick off, the Razordesk automatic installer requires (nay, it demands) a few prerequisites to help ensure a smooth execution. 

Prerequisites

1. The installer will install a new instance of Microsoft server SQL2012 Express with an instance name of SQLEXPRESS. If you already have SQL2012 running with the same name that's fine, it will install the database on that server. If however you have SQL running with that name from an earlier (or possibly later) version of SQL (SQL2008, 2005 etc) then you'll need to perform a manual installation. 

2. The installer technology used for loading the website component insists that you are running Internet Information Version 6 (IIS6). If your server is running an earlier version of IIS, you'll need to upgrade IIS or manually install Razordesk. If however, you are running IIS7 or some other later version of IIS, it's not all bad news as it can be configured to run in IIS6 compatibility mode. See the link for details on how to do this.

Getting the Installer

The auto installer comes as two files contained in a zip file called RazordeskAutoinstaller.zip

Extract the zip folder and you'll find two files, Setup.exe and Webinstaller.msi

Run (double click or right click Run) Setup.exe (this in turns runs webinstaller .msi as the right credentials)

Follow the instructions, use the default values suggested unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise. In particular, choose the DefaultAppPool to help ensure all goes well. If necessary the installer wil try to install SQL2012.

At the end, exit the installer and perform the following verification steps.

Check the Installation

The Database

Open SQL Server Management Studio  (SSMS) then connect to .\SQLEXPRESS .  If you don't have SSMS on your server you can download it for free from Microsoft from the link in the pod.

If all went well, you'll see a database bluetang_db and be able to view tables etc. Should there be no bluetang_db or if there is but it's in a state of 'recovering' then try uninstalling Razordesk and install again. If that fails, see the manual instructions on how to attach the database by hand. 

The Website

Razordesk is a web based application and will run from a standard IIS service. The auto installer requires II6 or II& with IIS6 compatibility enabled, however Razordesk can be manually installed on a system with II6 or higher (possibly even II5, though this is untested). 

Launch the IIS control panel and under default websites you should see a sub folder (virtual directory) called razordesk

Starting Razordesk

Now for the acid test. In a browser window run http://localhost/razordesk

The first time it is run, or the first time a particular page is opened, there might be a delay while IIS performs some initialisations. Hopefully you'll soon get a login tab and the company name 'Acme'. Login with admin and password abc123 and you are there.

If you can't log in or the company name is 'No database', there is an issue with connecting to the database. See the troubleshooting section.

Welcome to Razordesk

To access Razordesk open a browser and navigate to localhost/Razordesk

Login with username Admin and password abc123

You can change your password from the profile link