Both large companies and small business tend to accumulate a large and ever-growing pile of documents in paper form. In time, this may make it somewhat difficult to locate and preserve a given record and cause continuing expenses in printing materials. To overcome these challenges (and all others you can think of), in this article we will introduce you to LogicalDOC, a Document Management System (DMS). This solution not only provides an organized, centralized way to maintain your digital documents but also allows for easy team collaboration and flexible business automation. In addition, this document management software helps you to perform periodic backups to safeguard your data very easily and integrates seamlessly with Office suites such as LibreOffice or Microsoft Office. On top of this, LogicalDOC allows you to import files from a Dropbox account.
LogicalDOC is offered in 4 editions: Enterprise, Business, Cloud and Community. Although the first three require a paid contract, the last one is open source software released under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). For the Enterprise, Business and Cloud editions a 30-day trial is available. To request it, fill out the form here and wait ~15-30 minutes for the activation code to reach your email Inbox. You will need this activation code when installing this outstanding document management system later. For a feature comparison of these 4 LogicalDOC editions, refer to the Product Features page in the official website.
In a production environment, setting up LogicalDOC in a client-server environment requires a 2.4 GHz 32-bit (x86) or a 64-bit (x64) dual core processor and 6 GB of RAM. However, we will install the software on a machine with 2 GB for illustration purposes. Keep in mind that this environment is only suitable for testing and not for production.
Installing LogicalDOC in Linux
In this article we will explain how to install LogicalDOC Enterprise in Linux. The required steps to install the Community Edition (CE) are identical and only differ in that you will not be asked to request and enter an activation code.
Note that installing either version of this document management software will not require to install any kind of software on client workstations. We will install LogicalDOC CE in a CentOS 7 Linux server (IP 192.168.0.29) and we will access the DMS interface through a web browser from a computer in the same network. We will assume that all commands will be executed as root. If you are using a distribution that requires the use of sudo instead (Ubuntu for example), make sure to prepend it to the command.
Note: Step 1 below deals with the installation of the prerequisites whereas the rest refers to the installation of LogicalDOC itself.
Step 1 – Install the latest Java Development Kit and MySQL or MariaDB
To begin, go to the Oracle Downloads page and grab the URL for the latest JDK installation file (jdk-8u112-linux-x64.rpm at the time of this writing) and use wget as follows to download it. It is important to note that some Linux distributions may come with the OpenJDK package installed. Since it is incompatible with LogicalDOC, it must be removed from your system BEFORE proceeding:
yum remove *openjdk*
cd /opt
wget —no–cookies —no–check–certificate —header “Cookie:oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie” http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u112-b15/jdk-8u112-linux-x64.rpm
rpm –Uvh jdk–8u112–linux–x64.rpm
Then install MySQL or MariaDB:
yum install mariadb–server
You may also want to install additional packages that will allow you to better leverage LogicalDOC:
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ImageMagick to manipulate images for preview.
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Tesseract, an Open Source OCR, only if you want to extract text from images.
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Xpdf to generate html files from PDF documents.
In the next step we will download LogicalDOC and the Apache Tomcat web server, its core dependency.
Step 2 – Download and install the LogicalDOC and Tomcat bundle
LogicalDOC depends on the Apache Tomcat web server to display its user interface and make it accessible using a browser inside a network. Both components of the document management system are available at the Downloads page.
wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/logicaldoc-dist/logicaldoc/installers/logicaldoc-installer-7.6.zip
Uncompress it as follows:
unzip logicaldoc-installer-7.6.zip
Then type the command
java –jar logicaldoc–installer.jar
and follow the installation instructions.
Step 2a – Choose the installation language
Type the number that corresponds to the desired installation language as shown in Fig. 1 (0 for English) and type Enter:
Step 2b – Accept license agreement and choose installation path
You will now be prompted to accept the license agreement (press 1 and Enter). After that, As in 2a, type the desired option or press Enter directly to go with the default one, as seen in Fig. 2:
Step 3 – Enter the registration information
Next, you will be asked to enter the activation code you must have received via email earlier. Next, enter the registration name, your organization, a contact email address, and optionally your website, as seen in Fig. 3:
Step 4 – Choose the database engine
Although LogicalDOC can integrate seamlessly with several database engines, MySQL or MariaDB are recommended for production environments. Since the installation and user creation are outside the scope of this article, we will use the root MySQL user and its corresponding password. This also assumes that a database named logicaldoc has been previously created. When you are prompted for a manual specification for the database configuration URL, type 0 to disregard it and use the settings entered previously. From now on, you are safe to choose the default settings as shown in Fig. 4. Please note you will be asked to confirm the location path of additional software (LibreOffice, ImageMagick, and so forth). Press Enter to dismiss these promptings if you have not installed such software on your system.
Once all the required settings have been entered, the configuration will continue automatically. You will then be presented with the login credentials (which you should change immediately after logging in for the first time via the Personal → Change Password menu). To access the web interface, launch a browser and go to 192.168.0.29:8080 (change IP address or server name to suit your environment). Refer to Fig. 5 for more details:
Important: Before you can launch the web-based interface, you will need to make sure that port TCP 8080 is open on your firewall. In CentOS 7 use the following commands to do so:
firewall–cmd —add–port=8080/tcp —permanent
firewall–cmd —reload
If your distribution uses a different firewall, consult the documentation on how to open the above port.
Logging in to LogicalDOC
Once you’ve logged in, go to the Documents tab and click on Add documents. This will open a dialog that will allow you to select documents from your local computer. Fig. 6 shows a file named PagoVisa.pdf in the document list. Particularly, the Versions and Preview tabs will -once you’ve selected a file- show the versions of the document and display a preview of it:
Want to send the document by email? Just right click on the file and choose Send by email. A webmail-like built-in messaging window will pop-up and allow you to either attach the file or send a download ticket. (Of course, this requires an outgoing mail server to be configured under Administration tab → Outgoing email).
Last, but not least, add the following crontab entry in order for LogicalDOC to be available on system boot:
@reboot /LogicalDOC/bin/logicaldoc.sh start
If you want to stop the service at any time, you can do
/LogicalDOC/bin/logicaldoc.sh stop
Summary
Want to explore other LogicalDOC features? Go to Help → Documentation.
Using LogicalDOC is as easy as this. Don’t wait any longer and give it a try now. If you decide to buy a commercial license, you may contact the same sales representative that sent you the trial activation code. Then, you will be able to apply the new license to your LogicalDOC installation via AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD:8080/license, where AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD is the IP address or hostname of your server.
As always, feel free to let us know if you have questions or suggestions about this article. We look forward to hearing from you.
