Deploying Adobe LiveCycle Launchpad ES2 (9.5) for use by end users

As in many companies these days, our users don’t have administrative permissions to their PCs or to the various servers and services we give them access to. This means that the standard one-click web page deployment of LiveCycle Launchpad won’t work for our users, and also we have to configure the permissions within LiveCycle to give them the permissions needed. Here’s how we got it working:

Throughout this please replace any references to "LiveCycleServer" or port numbers in URLs with the appropriate ones for your environment.

Software Deployment

• Log into your LiveCycle server's admin console (as a user with at least some admin privileges):
  http://LiveCycleServer:8080/adminui/
• Then go to http://LiveCycleServer:8080/launchpad
  You should be able to download the .AIR executable from your server from this page, its address will be http://LiveCycleServer:8080/launchpad/installer/LaunchPad.air ).
• (If you haven’t already) Sign up to Adobe’s AIR Runtime distribution agreement, this should get you a link to the direct download for the corporate deployable, bare-bones, all-in-one, AIR runtime installer.
• Once you’ve been sent the link to the "Download Adobe AIR Runtime" page, you want to download the installer files under the "Adobe AIR Runtime Installer files: For use with a native installer or through CD/DVD redistribution using the Adobe AIR side-car configuration" heading.
• Put your LaunchPad.air and AdobeAIRInstaller.exe files into a folder together, and you can now push out the two together, with a command line like:
  AdobeAIRInstaller.exe -silent -eulaAccepted -programMenu LaunchPad.air
• Finally the first time that you run the LiveCycle Launchpad app, you’ll notice that the servername, protocol and port are all set to defaults, and not to your server’s settings. Have a look in c:\Program Files\Adobe\LiveCycle ES2\Adobe LiveCycle Launchpad ES2 on a PC that has Launchpad installed and you should see a Server.xml file, copy that to your distribution location, open it up in a text editor and change the server details to match your environment. You can now push this file out along with the Launchpad app to give your users the correct default settings (I just use an Xcopy to put this in the folder after install).

Now you’ll find that any users (who don’t have admin permissions within LiveCycle) who try to log into the Launchpad app will get an error like: "Server configuration specified here is invalid. Do you want to reconfigure the server settings?"

Permissions

So, once users have the app, you need to ensure that normal users can use it without needing admin access all through the LiveCycle server.

• Log into the LiveCycle admin console (as a user with at least some admin privileges):
  http://LiveCycleServer:8080/adminui/
• Go to Settings -> User Management -> Role Management
• Create a New Role, I called mine LaunchPad User, and obviously fill out the description field


• Assign them enough permissions to use the Launchpad app, according to these articles they need these permissions at a minimum they’ll need "Repository Read", "Repository Traverse", "Repository Write", "Document Upload" and they’ll also need the PDFG User role assigned as well. Depending on your LiveCycle config, and which modules you have, you may have to give them additional permissions to other modules to give them all of the available modules. See these articles for more info on permissions needed: Adobe Knowledgebase: Unable to use LiveCycle Launchpad services without administrative role - LiveCycle Launchpad ES2 (9.x) and Adobe Forums: Launchpad ES2 - Logging In Issue.


• Now assign these roles to end users (or preferably to a group to keep things tidy).

Done! You should now be able to deploy and give your users access to LiveCycle Launchpad. Next up (hopefully) deploying the LiveCycle ES2 PDFG Windows printer to your non-administrative users.