OX HE Tutorial 10K

Tutorial: OX HE Setup for up to 10.000 users

This article describes what you need for a typical OX HE Setup for up to 10.000 Users with minimal efforts.

It contains everything you need to:

• Understand the design of the OX HE setup including additional services
• Install the whole system based on the relevant articles
• Find pointers to the next steps of integration

System Design

The system is designed to provide maximum functionality with a minimum of necessary hardware. All OX services are running on one single machine.

Core Components for OX HE

• One OX HE server (HW recommendation: 16GB RAM / 4 cores)
• MySQL installed directly on this server
• Optional: NFS Server to store documents and files

Infrastructure Components not delivered by OX

• An email system providing IMAP and SMTP
• A control panel for creation and administration of users

Overview Installation Steps

To deploy the described OX setup, the following steps need to be done.

Mandatory Steps

1. Initialize and configure MySQL database
2. Install and configure OX service

Steps depending on your environment

1. Connect Control Panel
2. Connect Email System

Recommended Optional Next Steps

1. Automated Frontend Tests
2. Upsell Plugin
3. Mobile Autoconfiguration
4. Branding

Mandatory Installation Steps - Instructions & Recommendations

The following steps need to be done in every case to get OX up and running:

Initialize and configure MySQL database

MySQL will be installed directly on the OX server.

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Install and configure OX

OX will be installed on the server.

Optionally: The NFS server will be mounted and registered as filestore.

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You also should install and configure the OXtender for Business Mobility

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Installation Steps depending on your environment - Instructions & Recommendations

The following components need to be implemented in your environment.

Connect Control Panel

You need a Control Panel to create and edit users.

OX is designed to integrate into every solution you may already run in your environment and also into wide spread solutions, like the Parallels Control Panels.

If you do not run hosting services today and do not have a Control Panel in place, it is recommend to use Plesk to manage OX. With that combination you will get a full functional hosting platform containing everything you need.

Integrate your own Control Panel

If you already have a Control Panel in production, you should integrate OX with it. It is recommended to use the SOAP provisioning Interface for that purpose.

Read more about: Provisioning using SOAP

A good start to test and to understand the necessary commands are the Command Line Tools. They have exactly the same calls like the SOAP API.

Read more about: Open-Xchange CLT

Integrate with Plesk Panel

If you want to use Parallels Plesk Panel to manage your users, there is an OXtender available to integrate OX into the Plesk Panel.

Read more about installing Plesk_Integration

Authentication

Only necessary if you do not use Plesk as Control Panel.

To avoid password synchronization issues, it is recommended to use your existing email authentication mechanism within OX. Then you do not need to add user passwords to OX, you simply use a plugin to authenticate against your IMAP server.

Read more about the IMAP Authentication Plugin

Connect Email System

Every email system providing IMAP and SMTP can be used as backend to OX. Best experiences are made with the widespread Linux based IMAP servers Dovecot, Cyrus or Courier.

Other IMAP servers need to be tested thoroughly before going into production.

There are several possibilities to implement the Email system:

1. You already have an email system available: Nothing needs to be done, it just needs to be configured
2. You use Plesk Panel: Nothing special needs to be done, everything you need is contained in the OXtender for Plesk
3. You want to setup a new Email system: It is recommended to use Dovecot, as this is very stable, fast, feature rich and easy to scale

Dovecot Setup

If you want to setup a new Email system based on Dovecot, you can install Dovecot directly on the OX server.

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Recommended Optional Next Steps

You will find plenty of additional documentation for customization of OX in our knowledge base [1]

When the main setup is completed, we recommend to start with the following articles to enhance your system and to become more attractive for your users.

Automated Frontend Tests

It is a good idea, to verify the functionality of your freshly set up and integrated system. Our QA department does that with tests, running automatically on the web frontend. We release this tests with every release and recommend you to use them to verify your environment with every update.

Read more about Automated_GUI_Tests

Monitoring / Statistics

It is recommended to implement at least a minimal monitoring/Statistics solution to get an overview of the systems health. If you have a support contract with Open-Xchange, it is very helpful, if the support can access the monitoring graphs. There are example scripts for a basic monitoring with [Munin] available.

Read more about installing and configuring Munin scripts for Open-Xchange

Upsell Plugin / Webmail Replacement

If you want to use your OX based Webmail system to upsell premium functions like full groupware functionality or like push to mobile phones, it is strongly recommended to use the in-app sales process.

Read more about Upsell

Branding

If you want OX to look more like your own Corporate Identity, including your logo, product name and maybe your colors, this can be easily achieved by changing the logos and stylesheets.

Read more about: Gui_Theming_Description

Read more about: Gui Branding Plugins

Read more about: Branding via the ConfigCascade

Backup

It is recommended to run regular backups for your OX installation. This can be done with every backup solution for Linux.

Read more about Backup your Open-Xchange installation