Installation Guide & Architecture Overview

Please read all of the installation instructions completely in this manual before proceeding! 

Installation of the Integral Accounting Enterprise must be done by someone that is very familiar with Visual Studio Dot Net, the Dot Net Framework, Visual Basic Dot Net, ASP Dot Net, general programming techniques, Internet Information Server (IIS), SQL Server 2005 and / or SQL Server 2005 Express, the Windows Operating System XP, 2000, 2003, Vista, and the Windows Security Model. 

You will also need to know how to compile a Visual Studio Dot Net application in order to complete this installation, and the standard installation of web applications, including the purpose and use of Virtual Directories and web.config files. 

If you do not have a good understanding of the issues mentioned above, please find someone who understands these issues to help you correctly install the software.

The Integral Accounting Enterprise System is a multi-tiered application with several different layers. The system consists of the following layers:

The Enterprise Database - A Database Layer implemented in SQL Server 2005 (also fully compatible with SQL Server 2005 Express)

The Web Services Layer - An XML-based business Logic Layer implemented as a collection of Web-Services

The Web Presentation Layer - An Internet Based Presentation Layer (Client GUI) Implemented in ASP Dot Net 2.0 using Master Pages and relying heavily on XML. Some places in the documentation may also refer to this layer as the ASP Dot Net presentation layer or simply the ASP Dot Net layer.

The Desktop Presentation Layer - A Desktop Based Presentation Layer (Client GUI) implemented in Visual Basic Dot Net. The Desktop Application acts as a "shell application" that presents the web-based presentation layer in a locally-operated application on the desktop that "looks and behaves" like a standard desktop application. Some places in the documentation may also refer to this layer as the VB Dot Net presentation layer, the desktop app or the desktop layer, or simply the VB Dot Net layer.

You can set up the system to run on a single server, run each Layer on it's own server, or split the application tiers across multiple groups of servers. However, these setup instructions are going to assume that you are setting up this system for the first time on a development or test server.
 

PLEASE NOTE:

You must install this complete system exactly according to these installation instructions and to all of the default locations, and using the default passwords on a test server or we will not be able to provide you with technical support.

Please note that by not doing the initial product installation to the default locations, you are limiting the ability of technical support to help you solve any problems that you encounter, and, if we encounter a problem we can't solve, we will ask you to re-install the software to default locations to remove this as a variable that may be causing problems.

Once you set-up the system and understand how is functions and how it is organized you can them move the system to your custom locations and change the configurations as you see fit.

The Web Services Layer and the Web Presentation layer must be hosted on a machine running IIS. Even if you do not plan on using the Web Services Layer or the Web Presentation layer, they must be installed anyway, since the Web Services Layer and the Web Presentation Layer both provide reporting services and other required services to the Desktop application.