Adding ACTS to an Existing On-premise Adobe Connect Server Deployment
This server installation and upgrade article applies only to on-premise Adobe Connect deployments
The Adobe Connect Transmuxing server (ACTS) is required to support connection to Adobe Connect Meetings using the HTML5 browser option. The Adobe Connect Meeting Application does not require ACTS. Some customers have chosen not to install ACTS and just deploy the Adobe Connect meeting Application.
The ACTS server installer is part of the Adobe Connect server full installer. Between full installers however, Adobe Connect Engineering has published and continues to publish and deploy small patches (or dot releases) that update the version of the Adobe Connect cluster or server. These patches are often very easy to deploy; some contain scripts to update the schema in the Adobe Connect SQL database.
When adding ACTS to an existing cluster, the ACTS installer is looking for the version of Adobe Connect with which it is bundled. For example, the Adobe Connect version 11.2.0 full installer includes a version of the ACTS server that expects to be installed with Adobe Connect version 11.2.0 and not a later version of Adobe Connect updated to a dot release version sucjh as 11.4. A problem occurs when attempting to add ACTS to an Adobe Connect server or cluster that had been updated with an Adobe Connect server updater or patch that is not a full installer. The ACTS installation will fail with the following error in the install log: java.sql.SQLException: [Macromedia][SQLServer JDBC Driver][SQLServer]Database ‘breeze’ already exists. Choose a different database name. (Where ‘breeze’ is the name of your database).
There are a few approaches to solving this issue. A prudent server administrator will have snapshots of the servers at each point of upgrade and may just revert to the full installer version, install ACTS and then apply the missing patches. This may not be practical however given content updates and database correlation. A second possibility is to wait for the next full installer of Adobe Connect server and install ACTS along with the upgrade. As of the writing of this article the current updater that is deployed is 11.0.6 and next full installer will be Adobe Connect 11.2 tentative for middle March 2021.
If you wish to install ACTS to a version of Adobe Connect that is not part of a full installer, we do have a workaround:
1)Extract the acts.zip from in merge_module folder in the full installer.
2) Copy the Release folder present in acts.zip\fileset\dist\build\x64\Release to \11.2.0\ACTS (C:\breeze\11.2.0\ACTS)
3)Open CMD or PowerShell as admin and change the directory to ACTS folder.
4) To install ACTS run ConnectorMaster.exe -i
5) Start the ACTS service with sc start acts or from service console.
6) Register ACTS with the API
http://localhost:8510/api/xml?action=acts-host-register&acts-host-name=adobead-11d5a97&external-name=localhost
NOTE: This will install acts with default configs. Check all applied Adobe Connect Update zip files for any updates to the ACTS server and apply those to ACTS to make the version of ACTS correlate with the version of Adobe Connect. Note that the Adobe Connect 11.2.1 updater has a significant ACTS update.
Be sure to review the ACTS installation portion of the Adobe Connect installation guide along with the relevant tech-notes on the Adobe Connect Support Blog:
https://helpx.adobe.com/adobe-connect/installconfigure/install-connect-using-installer.html
https://blogs.connectusers.com/connectsupport/registering-acts-servers-in-connect-10-x/