OX as a Service Guide

Integrate OX as a Service into your POA system

The OX as a Service is an Email and Collaboration solution provided by OX/FTS and Dovecot. This service is completely cloud based, fully managed and operated in a 24x7 support model. The OX as a Service provides easy and secure access to email, calendar, documents, media, social, and file sharing.

Requirements

You need to have at least POA 5.4 in order to use this product.

Get the APS package

You can download the package from the application catalog: OX as a Service

Note: Please contact us in order to receive the latest version of that package.

Write your own integration

Check out the documentation on how to write your own integration.

How to become a customer?

To become a customer of the OX as a Service just contact us and one of sales representatives will get back to you. A contact form and information you can find under https://www.open-xchange.com/company/contact-ox.

Please note that the OX as a Service is offered only to service providers and telecommunication companies who want to add the OX as a Service to their solution portfolio.

Changelog

Since 2.0-86

• Changed case sensitiveness handling
• Added missing resource scripts

Since 2.0-82

• added more allowed characters to admin_login

Since 2.0-81

• another display name uniqueness fix
• prevent users from creating account with the same email as context admin

Since 2.0-76

• http useragent now set to package name and version
• support for renaming context admin login
• display names now only unique per instance
• use correct setting_id in account verification

Since 2.0-47

• added new edition type Webmail

Since 2.0-45

• added more allowed characters to ox_login

Since 2.0-43

• added mandatory field indicator to translations
• added missing translations for domain catchall

Since 2.0-42

• fixed enable/disable in alias management

Since 2.0-39

• Allow changing of theming for existing contexts
• Updated translations

Since 2.0-34

• Added domain check to verify-account script to prevent users from defining arbitrary email addresses
• Fixed Displayname uniqueness check
• Fixed alias uniqueness check (prevent users from creating alias for primary email address)

Since 2.0-25

• Added theming for resellers in context service
• Indication of mandatory fields in service user creation
• Check user and adminlogin for valid characters

Since 2.0-10

• Upsell now available via 6 user types: Basic/Advanced/Pro/Pro M/Pro L/Pro XL

Since 2.0-5

• Use "global" uniqueness for context name to prevent clashes when multiple packages exist in the same POA system

Since 2.0-4

• Autologin via entry point can now optionally be turned off completely

Since 2.0-3

• Added new edition type "Advanced"

Since 2.0-0

• New major version 2.0
• It is impossible to update from 1.0 to 2.0 since there are incompatible setting changes
• New Login settings
• Catchall Domain support
• Package has been renamed to OX as a Service

Prepare the provisioning node

The OX as a Service APS package uses perl to provision and thus requires the SOAP::Lite perl module.

It is recommended to use CentOS6, DebianSqueeze or RHEL6 or newer on the provisioning host.

If you are running on CentOS5, you could install the missing packages via EPEL.

• add EPEL to the yum repositories http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
  • http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL#How_can_I_use_these_extra_packages.3F
• download the package epel-release-6-8.noarch or newer
• install it manually via rpm
• then run yum install perl-SOAP-Lite perl-XML-Writer perl-IO-Socket-SSL perl-libintl perl-libwww-perl php php-pear php-xmlrpc php-xml

Allow custom login for service users

Since the login format of OXaaS users is not restricted to an email address, this must be explicitly allowed in POA. This can be done in PCP > Settings > System Properties

Resources

Upload the package into your POA system and fill the required parameters that have been sent to you. When you are asked for the provisioning attributes for new resource type, you have to select External Provisioning.

Application Resource

Open-Xchange will send you the required data to configure the resource type in POA. Please see the explanation below.

Global settings:

OX as a Service provisioning URL 

Url to provision Open-Xchange accounts into the OX as a Service via SOAP. Usually, this URL ends with /webservices, e.g. https://provisioning.example.com/webservices

OX as a Service website URL 

The brand specific URL for your customers to login to OX App Suite

Administrator Login/Password 

The username and password needed to provision accounts

Custom Information Text 

If you provide this optional parameter, it will be displayed in the customer control panel when the customer creates the Context service.

List of shared domains that can be used by services of this resource type 

Optionally list some domains that customers should be able to use for the creation of aliases not bound to POA.

Debug mode 

turn debugging on or of; NOTE: If on, passwords will also be captured!

POA api Host 

Enter the ip address or dns hostname of your POA api host here. This is needed to generated domains, see below.

MX Target 1-4 

Please fill the mx hostnames here we sent to you

Domain Prefix 

prefix of auto generated domains

Domain Name 

base domain for autogenration

Default settings:

Here you have to configure the defaults for new accounts/context when provisioned in Open-Xchange.

Default Interface Language 

The default language for new users

Default time zone 

The default timezone for new users

Basic Edition OX App Suite file quota per user (in MB)

The file quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Basic Edition mail quota per user (in MB)

The mail quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Advanced Edition OX App Suite file quota per user (in MB)

The file quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Advanced Edition mail quota per user (in MB)

The mail quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Pro Edition OX App Suite file quota per user (in MB)

The file quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Pro Edition mail quota per user (in MB)

The mail quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Pro M Edition OX App Suite file quota per user (in MB)

The file quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Pro M Edition mail quota per user (in MB)

The mail quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Pro L Edition OX App Suite file quota per user (in MB)

The file quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Pro L Edition mail quota per user (in MB)

The mail quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Pro XL Edition OX App Suite file quota per user (in MB)

The file quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Pro XL Edition mail quota per user (in MB)

The mail quota per user in MByte as defined per contract

Edition type 

Define the default edition type for the creation of new users

Note: Leave the settings below Application service "Shared Email aliases management" and Application service "Catch-All configuration" without changes. These settings must only be changed by the customers.

Application Service Resources

OX App Suite Account

For each of the existing Edition Type setting, create a resource based on Application Service.

Application Counter Resources

There are currently three Application Counter resources available:

Disk space used by OX App Suite files

Counts the diskspace used by the complete tenant/subscription. This does not include mail.

Disk space used by OX as a Service mail

Counts the mail storage used by the complete tenant/subscription.

Disk space used by OX as a Service mail per user

Counts the mail storage used by the individual user.

They are used to display quota usage.

Note: Since POA will display the mail quota usage per webmail even though it is not used, you have to configure it always (in adding it to the Service Template).

Service Template

Now create a Service Template containing all Resource Type you plan to use.

It must at least contain the Application Resource and the Application Counter resource for Disk space used by OX as a Service mail per user since this will be displayed into CCP anyway. If you do not add it, it will display wrong values.

Feature description

Shared Domains

Version 1.0-118 and above of the OX as a Service APS package has support for domains that can be shared across POA customers. This is implemented as another service below account on the same level as ordinary aliases. To use this feature, a list of domains must be specified in the resource type configuration.

NOTE: MX records need to be added manually to the domain in order to be able to receive emails.

If the feature should not be used, just turn off Application service "OX App Suite Account > Shared Email aliases management" in the resource types services configuration.

Autogenerated Domains

This feature allows to automatically generate subdomains within a configured domain. The name of these domains depend on the configuration of Domain Name and Domain Prefix in the Resource Type, see #Parameters.

A generated domain will look like this:

prefixcompanyname.domain

Company name will have stripped off all characters that are not allowed in a domain name.

Example

When Domain Name is set to example.com, Domain Prefix is set to foo and the name of the company would be John Doe Inc, the resulting autogenerated domain will be

foojohndoeinc.example.com

Domain Catchall

Version 2.0-0 and above has support to define a catchall account per domain.

The availability of this feature, however, depends on your contract.

Branding / Theming

Version 2.0-25 and above has support for theming as it is build into POA. There's a new group of settings in the defaults. All these settings are optional.

frame_color 

frame color in #rrggbb

icon_color 

icon color in #rrggbb

selection_color 

selection color in #rrggbb

logo_width 

width of the logo

logo_url 

url to the custom logo

Using these settings, you can define brands via System>Settings>Brands in POA.

and assign the different brands to customers