Accessing Web Application Outside Your Firewall

Many small business clients ask us how to access OfficeClip from their mobile device when it is installed within their firewall. This article will discuss some of the ways how this can be achieved.

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1. You can install OfficeClip outside your firewall or use the private clouds like Azure, AWS or another virtual service at a service provider.
2. You can open the HTTP (or HTTPS) port to access OfficeClip by adding a port forwarding rule and getting a dynamic domain address. This article will discuss this technique. See the video below if you have problems following this article.

Requirements:

1. Get the IP address of your machine
   This can be easily found by bringing up a command prompt and typing ipconfig on it. Note the IPv4 address.
2. Add a rule to windows firewall
   This allows the incoming traffic coming to your webserver from outside the machine. On the desktop, machine windows stop incoming traffic for obvious reasons. You can bring up Windows Firewall and Advanced Security application and add a rule to allow all traffic from port 90 or 443 (if using SSL).
3. Add a router port forwarding address
   When someone accesses your machine from outside the server they have to come through your router (unless your machine is directly connected to the internet). In the router port-forwarding menu you will need to add a rule to redirect all traffic coming to port 80 (and 443) to the machine where OfficeClip is installed.
4. Create a dynamic URL to access the site
   Another issue is that with some provider the public IP address can change every time the router initiates a fresh DNS connection with the service provider. When this happens, the existing connection to your OfficeClip server will get disconnected. To avoid this you can create a free virtual DNS account with a provider like no-ip.com (sometimes your router has capability to do this). This will provide you with a URL that will stay in sync with the new IP address. Your user can then connect to OfficeClip with this new virtual URL.
5. Add SSL certificate
   To make the interactions with the OfficeClip server and your customer’s browser, you can get an SSL certificate and install it on the IIS where OfficeClip is installed.

If you have any issues setting this up with OfficeClip please contact our support team and we will help you set it up.

 Credit: Flickr Creative Commons Attribution