Thanks to the pandemic, a large portion of the workforce is working from home. In some instances, it means having the tools to do your job available on your own LAN. After all, you might have sensitive company information and you don’t want it on a third-party cloud service or transmitting over a less-than-secure consumer-grade LAN or WAN connection. Or, you just might want to have your own tools available at all times to help you get things done.

So what do you do? There are a number of available options. One such option is the ONLYOFFICE Workspace Community Edition. With this, you can make available a powerful workspace to your LAN that includes:

• Project management

• Documents

• CRM

• Calendar

• Mail server

• Contacts

• News and knowledge base

Deploying this solution is actually quite easy. The only challenge is making sure your hosting machine meets the minimum system requirements, which are:

• CPU: Dual-core 2 GHz or better

• RAM: 6 GB or more

• Storage: At least 40 GB of free space (for the installation)

• Swap: At least 6 GB of swap

I’ll be demonstrating how to run this deployment on Ubuntu Server 20.04, with the help of Docker. Don’t worry–you won’t have to craft a DockerFile or run a complicated Docker command as the installation is done with a simple script.

SEE: Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players (TechRepublic)

What you’ll need

I’ve already listed out the minimum system requirements. Along with that, you’ll need a Linux distribution that has a kernel newer than 3.10 (which should cover most modern versions). You’ll also need a user with sudo privileges.

How to install Docker

The first thing we must do is install Docker (as that’s the route we’ll take for deployment). For this, log in to your server and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install docker.io -y

When that installation completes, add your user to the docker group with the command:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Log out of the server and log back in.

How to deploy ONLYOFFICE Workspace

Once you’ve logged back in to the server, download the installation script with the command:

wget https://download.onlyoffice.com/install/workspace-install.sh

If you need ONLYOFFICE to include a mail component, you’ll run the installer like so:

sudo bash workspace-install.sh -md "DOMAIN"

Where DOMAIN is the domain associated with the server.

If you don’t need a mail component, you’ll run the installer like this:

sudo bash workspace-install.sh -ims false

When prompted type Y to select a Docker deployment for ONLYOFFICE Workspace (Figure A).

Figure A

The container deployment will take between two to five minutes. When it successfully completes, you will get your prompt returned. 

How to access your ONLYOFFICE Workspace

With the container deployed, open a web browser and point it to http://SERVER (where SERVER is either the IP address or domain of your hosting server). You will be greeted by a registration screen (Figure B).

Figure B

In this screen, create a strong/unique password, enter an email address to associate with the account, select your language and timezone from the drop-downs, and click the checkbox associated with By Checking This Box You Accept The Terms Of The License Agreements.

Click Continue to complete the installation. When it completes (and it should do so fairly quickly), you’ll find yourself on the ONLYOFFICE Workspace dashboard, logged in as the administrator (Figure C).

Figure C

At this point you can start using ONLYOFFICE Workspace. If you want to invite others to use the portal on your LAN, go to People and then click Invite Users To Portal (Figure D). This will present a link you can either send (if you’ve installed with a mail component) or copy and share (if you didn’t install with a mail component). 

Figure D

Congratulations, you now have a LAN-based groupware solution that can help make your pandemic work-from-home situation a bit easier and possibly more secure. Give ONLYOFFICE Workspace Community Edition a go and see if you don’t wind up using it as your go-to LAN groupware suite.

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