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Local and Hosted Solutions
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The primary decision for OpenEngagement DMS users is choosing between using a Hosted or a Local Solution. This documentation will cover both systems, but some sections apply only to one or the other.
With a Hosted Solution, OpenEngagement provides an OpenEngagement DMS instance on one of its servers. With the Local Solution, firms will download the OpenEngagement DMS installer and install it on one or more servers within their organization. They may install the OpenEngagement DMS inside or outside a firewall, as they see appropriate.
The Hosted Solution will offer a greater ease of use, requiring less setup and less maintenance. It will, though, necessitate an internet connection. It is recommended that users download more than one engagement at a time from the OpenEngagement DMS where there are risks of loss of internet connections, in order to not loose productivity during network failures. Firms with reliable internet connections should not have any problems in this respect. OpenEngagement provides very highly reliable service, based on multiple levels of redundancy and 24/7 monitoring.
Hosted Solutions handle database replication, backups and the rotation of backups, relieving the users of these and other such responsibilities. They also provide greater performance tuning than is done out of the box with the Local Solution. Hosted Solutions take advantage of Open-BSD, Linux and Windows operating systems, and fronting the OpenEngagement DMS HTTP server with Apache and Squid. This may be done by users of the Local Solution as well, but involves some setup. With Hosted Solutions as well, OpenEngagement takes advantage of a technology known as Zope Enterprise Objects, or ZEO, along with load-balancing to utilize multiple computers to host a single OpenEngagement DMS instance, in order to maintain high performance even with high traffic volume. This is possible but quite difficult to set up for users of Local Solutions.
The installer provided to install the Local Solution is quite simple to execute and can run on any Windows XP or Windows 2003 computer. It sets the OpenEngagement DMS up as a Windows service (which means the OpenEngagement DMS will start and stop with the computer on which it’s installed – whenever that computer is rebooted, the OpenEngagement DMS will automatically start.) The OpenEngagement DMS also provides an HTTP server and a database, meaning, although performance can be tweaked by using additional tools, no other applications are necessary to run the OpenEngagement DMS; it is self-sufficient. Working Papers is the only application it must be integrated with, and it is therefore relatively easy to install, though by no means the near zero effort associated with the Hosted Solution. With significant amounts of data or traffic, good hardware is necessary to provide adequate performance.