At a simple level, QlikView Server is a product that serves QlikView documents to connected users.

Users connect to AccessPoint—the out of the box QlikView web portal—and see their documents. They click on a document and it opens, displaying their up-to-date data.

Of course, under the hood, it is a lot more complex than that. There are multiple services in action. The main one is the QlikView Server service that actually loads the documents into memory on the server and delivers the information to clients. The QlikView Web Server service hosts AccessPoint and renders the QlikView documents to web and mobile clients. The Directory Service connector allows QlikView to connect to different user repositories and the QlikView Management service links everything together.

Up-to-date data is important to users, so we have the QlikView Distribution Service. Without a QlikView Publisher license, this is a simple reload engine that reloads the documents on a schedule. After adding the Publisher license, the Distribution Service becomes a service that reloads documents and distributes them to multiple locations with multiple options and schedules.

Before you begin to think about installing QlikView Server, there are some important things that you should know. We will cover them all in this chapter.

When you install the product, you are going to need some hardware in place—either physical or virtual—so you will need to understand the implications of different configurations and sizes.

Because QlikView is built on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), we will also look at the architecture of the different services so that you might understand how many servers you might need to deploy.

We will also look at the different licenses that you can use with QlikView Server and the different client types that can be deployed.

These are the topics we'll be covering in this chapter: