Enabling Sitecore DMS

I have been working more with Sitecore as of late and one of the things I wanted to do was work with DMS. Every time I went into a DMS functional area though all I could get was "Analytics is disabled" message. So it was time to start plugging away to figure out why. The install steps are not clear, or at least they were not to me. Here are the steps I took to getting DMS enabled:

1) First check out John West’s blog for some things to check

If you are missing the Sitecore.Analytics.config file you probably missed the database install step of getting DMS up and running. You need to make sure you download and unzip the database zip file that holds the config files and database files for the Analytics database, for your version. Once you have that download here are a few steps you may have missed.

2) Move the config files to <sitecore site>\Website\App_Config\Include

3) Add a connection string settings to the ConnectionString.config file (<sitecore site>\Website\App_Config) with the name “analytics.”

At this point try and go into engagement analytics. The disabled message should have gone away. It may even work for you at this point. For me I still had database errors about invalid objects. This was an easy one though. When I copied the database connection string I forgot to update the database name to the analytics database.

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