The importance of collaborative document editing in today's business cannot be overestimated. The ability to draw up contracts and agreements with the participation of employees from the legal department, write commercial proposals online under the supervision of superiors, and so on, allows the company to save thousands of man-hours that were previously spent on numerous approvals. That is why one of the main innovations in was the emergence of Zextras Docs - a solution that allows you to organize full-fledged collaboration with documents directly in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open-Source Edition web client.
Currently, Zextras Docs supports collaboration with text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and can also handle a huge number of file formats. The interface of the solution is not much different from the interface of any text editor, so that employees of the enterprise do not have to spend a lot of time on training to switch to using Zextras Docs. But the most interesting, as always, is "under the hood". Let's take a look together at how Zextras Docs works and what benefits this document collaboration solution can offer.
Most of all, Zextras Docs will appeal to those who already use Zimbra OSE and Zextras Suite in their enterprise. Using this solution, you can implement a new service in production without increasing the number of information systems and, as a result, do without increasing the cost of owning an IT infrastructure. To clarify, Zextras Docs is only compatible with Zimbra OSE version 8.8.12 and later. That is why, if you are still using outdated versions of Zimbra, we strongly recommend upgrading to version 8.8.15 LTS. Due to the long support period, this version will remain relevant and secure for several more years, and will also be compatible with all current add-ons.
The advantages of Zextras Docs can also include the possibility of its full deployment on the enterprise infrastructure. This avoids the transfer of information to third parties, as is often the case when using hybrid or cloud services. That is why Zextras Docs is ideal for enterprises with a strict information security policy and for those system administrators who prefer to fully control the data flows and processes occurring in the enterprise. In addition, a locally deployed document collaboration service allows you to avoid the risks associated with the unavailability of the cloud service if there are problems with the service provider, or if there are problems with high-speed Internet access.
Zextras Docs consists of three parts: a standalone server, an extension, and a zimlet. Each of these three parts does its part of the job:
- The Zextras Docs server is a LibreOffice engine tailored for collaboration and integration with Zimbra OSE. It is on the Zextras Docs server that all documents accessed by users are opened, processed and stored. It must be installed on a dedicated computing node running Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04 or CentOS 7. If the load on the Zextras Docs service is large enough, you can allocate several servers for it at once.
- The Zextras Docs extension does not need to be installed as it is built into the Zextras Suite. Thanks to this extension, the user connects to the Zextras Docs server, as well as load balancing when using multiple servers. In addition, through the Zextras Docs extension, several users can simultaneously connect to one document, as well as upload files from local storage to the server.
- The Zextras Docs zimlet, in turn, is needed to integrate the service into the web client. It is thanks to him that the Zimbra web client has the ability to create, as well as the function of previewing Zextras Docs documents.
In order to deploy Zextras Docs in an enterprise, you must first allocate one or more physical or virtual servers for it. After that, you need to download the distributions of the server application from the Zextras website for , or and then unzip it and install it. At the final stage of the installation, the server will ask you to specify the IP address of the LDAP server, as well as a login / password pair that will be used to enter data about the new server into LDAP. Note that after installation is complete, each Zextras Docs server will be visible to all other infrastructure nodes.
Since the Zextras Docs extension is already included in the Zextras Suite, it will be enough to simply enable the ability to use it for those users and groups who need to have access to document collaboration tools. The Zextras Docs zimlet can be activated from the Zimbra admin console. Note that after adding the Zextras Docs server to the Zimbra OSE infrastructure, you need to update the Zimbra Proxy configuration. To do this, just execute the file /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmproxyconfgen as a Zimbra user and then run the command zmproxyctl restart to restart the proxy service.
For all questions related to Zextras Suite, you can contact the Representative of Zextras company Katerina Triandafilidi by e-mail [email protected]
Source: habr.com