Document management for the small office

Installation

LogicalDOC is available as a ZIP archive. After registering on the vendor's website, the user receives an approximately 525MB archive as a link to a download page. Packages for virtual environments are available too, as are various add-ons for file viewers, cloud uploads, backup tools, and the integration of an FTP or a CIFS server.

Linux users need to check in advance whether their installation includes Java JDK 8 or newer. You can find out, regardless of your distro, with the java -version command. LogicalDOC works both with the OpenJDK environment and with Oracle's original Java package. Additionally, a MySQL server should already be in place on the system.

Ubuntu users also need to make sure that they install the LogicalDOC package with root privileges; type sudo su in a terminal and then call the installer with the command:

java -jar logicaldoc-installer.jar

The routine bundles the package onto your mass storage device (Figure 4) in 13 steps.

Figure 4: You can get through the installation dialog for LogicalDOC relatively quickly, despite numerous steps.

Interestingly, the installation routine also queries the paths to third-party applications that display documents as external programs, read text, and convert files. The applications used here are exclusively free software. On most current Linux distributions, the user only needs to adjust the path to the office suite, because LogicalDOC still expects the presence of OpenOffice and offers you the standard installation path for calling the software.

You will generally want to enter the path to the now preferred LibreOffice at this point. LogicalDOC operators can install packages, such as ImageMagick, Ghostscript, Pdftohtml, Tesseract, and OpenSSL, depending on the application scenario, to achieve full functionality.

GUI

LogicalDOC also uses the web browser as the interface. To access the application, you type http://<IP address of the server>:8080 in the address bar if you are calling the DMS from some other computer on your intranet. On the local computer, access is available by typing http://localhost:8080.

After a computer reboot, however, you first need to enable the LogicalDOC server; to do so, pop up a terminal with root privileges and enter:

service logicaldoc start

In the DMS's login screen, you then authenticate for the first time with admin:admin. Additionally, you can change the locale, if needed. A straightforward window with three large display areas and two ribbons arranged horizontally appears in the left-hand panel.

A Question of Settings

In the next step, you get to create the users and groups by clicking at top left on the Administration tab in the main window and then clicking the Security button. After selecting Users in the drop-down menu, a list of users registered with the system appears on the right. The Add User button lets you create a new user (Figure 5) and assign the user the necessary rights and appropriate group memberships.

Figure 5: In LogicalDOC, you can create new users in just a few steps.

You can create new groups in the same menu and then proceed to assign individual users to the groups. To discover what rights the individual groups and users have and make changes if necessary, click on the current document group in the tree on the left and then open the Security tab at bottom right. In the tab, you can check and uncheck options to assign and revoke highly granular group and user rights. Users also inherit the assigned rights; group rights always apply to all members of a group (Figure 6).

Figure 6: LogicalDOC has a finely tunable rights management system.

In the next step, documents can be imported, scanned, and processed. For that, the DMS offers options the Documents tab in the buttonbar at top center in the window. Users can also import complete folders here.

On the left side of the window, the document groups appear in a tree view; below this, the folders are assigned to them in hierarchical order, if needed. Users can right-click on a document group or folder to choose from various management tasks. For example, you can create new folders. With the folders, you also see an empty document table that appears on the right and can now be filled in. At bottom right, several tabs show various properties of the currently selected document.

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