Many of our customers have requested to host their installed version of OfficeClip outside their company. In this article we present a way to host OfficeClip on the Amazon EC2 cloud. OfficeClip uses Windows 2008 Datacenter OS and Sql Express 2008 image on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Running OfficeClip on the amazon EC2 cloud will provide you with the following benefits:

• You can run the installed version of OfficeClip on a dedicated server.
• There is no need to install OfficeClip, the installation is already done for you and you can just configure and run it.
• You have the flexibility to increase or decrease the machine resources based on your needs.
• It is cheaper than many dedicated or virtual servers you can find in the market.

When running OfficeClip on Amazon cloud, you need to be careful about your running resources. The meter will keep running for all used or allocated resources, so unused resources lying around will pick up cost in no time!

We provide step by step procedure on how to start a new instance of OfficeClip on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Please contact us if you need OfficeClip engineers to do complete setup, configuration and support for your EC2 instance of OfficeClip. This is not covered by the OfficeClip usual free support and upgrades.

Please use this forum for any support on the EC2 installation.

Creating a new Amazon EC2 account

1. Go to https://aws.amazon.com, and select Sign-up Now. Sign in to your existing Amazon account or create a new one.
2. Go to https://aws.amazon.com/ec2, and select Sign Up for Amazon EC2

   1. Enter your credit card information.
   2. Complete your signup for the Amazon EC2 service.

Activating the OfficeClip Instance

1. Sign in to AWS Management Console. at https://aws.amazon.com
2. Click on the EC2 Tab and then click AMIs under IMAGES.
3. Select Public Images under Viewing and search for OfficeClip. It may take a while to load, please be patient.
4. Right click on the OfficeClip AMI and select Launch Instance.
5. On the popup that comes up, select Instance type as small and press the button Continue.
6. Continue to the next screen.
7. Enter a value on the right of the Name field that can be used to recognize the instance (you can put any string here).
8. Select Proceed without a Key Pair and click Continue.
9. Select Create a new Security Group and follow these steps:

   1. Enter security group name and description in the text boxes of popup window.  Click on the Select... drop down at the bottom.
   2. Select RDP from the dropdown list and click on Add Rule button, now do the same for the HTTP, HTTPS and SMTP protocols.
   3. Click on Continue.

10. Confirmation screen will be shown. Press Launch.
11. Close the next popup that comes up.
12. Go to Instances tab on the main AWS screen, wait for the new instance to show as running and right click and select Connect
13. From the popup that comes up, follow Option 1 and download the shortcut file on your desktop.
14. Double click on the file you just downloaded to connect to your machine. Note that this may take 10 to 15 minutes for you to connect to the machine the first time. If it fails try again after 15 to 20 minutes. You should get the login prompt on the remote desktop. Use the following credentials to login to the OfficeClip server:

    login : Administrator

    password : S)*AxMB%&u

15. When you have logged in to the server, click on the OfficeClip icon on the desktop and proceed step-by-step to create a new instance of OfficeClip. Note that this will enable the free edition of OfficeClip.
16. To change this to 30-day evaluation of the professional edition please follow these steps: https://forum.officeclip.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=181   (see section for the Installed Version)
17. To access OfficeClip from outside this server follow these steps:

    1. From the AWS console select Instances from the left menu.
    2. Click on the running instance and see the properties on the bottom window.
    3. Note the Public DNS entry which is in the form of ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-x.amazonaws.com where xx is some number set by Amazon.
    4. OfficeClip can now be accessed by typing https://ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx....OfficeClip/default.aspx.

18. Note that the above url is a temporary url and will be lost if the Amazon ec2 instance is stopped or terminated. To get a permanent ip address use Amazon Elastic IPs

Setting up Elastic IPs

1. From the left menu of AWS windows click on Elastic APIs.
2. Click Allocate New Address and click Yes on the confirmation screen. An IP address will be created and shown on the screen.
3. Right click on the ip address and select Associate.
4. Select your Instance by name.
5. Now you can access OfficeClip using the url: https://elastic-ip-address/officeclip/default.aspx

Associating elastic ip with a domain name

To access OfficeClip using a domain name e.g. https://www.my.company.com/OfficeClip, you need to associate it with a domain name. To do this go to your DNS manager and point your A record to this IP address

Using SSL certificate with OfficeClip

You can buy the certificate from a certificate provider and then install it in IIS, there are many certificate providers where you can buy the certificate from. To install the OfficeClip certificate see this site: https://www.digicert.com...tion-microsoft-iis-7.htm

Setting up SMTP for OfficeClip Instance

1. Go to the OfficeClip installation folder c:\program files(x86)\OfficeClip\8 and run the program OfficeClip.Install.OCConfigure.exe
2. Follow the steps to setup the SMTP provider. To debug smtp provider see: https://forum.officeclip.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=122

Backing up OfficeClip Data

The easiest way is to create a new backup EBS volume and use the OfficeClip's backup program to make regular backups. If you want to do this please see: https://forum.officeclip...lt.aspx?g=posts&t=11

Pricing considerations for running OfficeClip at Amazon

OfficeClip can run in many different modes in Amazon. Depending on your workload and requirements you can select an instance type. For details please see: https://aws.amazon.com/windows/

• We recommend small instance for most OfficeClip installations. This will cost you $0.12 per hour. If you sign up 1 year (for $227.50) or 3 years (for $350) the hourly price will fall down to $0.05 per hour (this is called Reserved Instance). For example for a 3 years contract (Reserved instance) the price of the small instance is $350 fixed price + $36 per month (24 x 30 x 0.05)
• Amazon also charges for the EBS Drive(Elastic Block Storage), OfficeClip uses 30GB of disk space for OfficeClip Instance at $0.10 per GB per month. So it will be $3.00 per month (30 x 0.10).
• Amazon also charges for disk access and it costs about $0.10 per million of I/O request. We have not measured this load yet but we estimate that this should not exceed $3.00 per month as long as other programs are not loaded in the server.
• There are some ways to reduce this cost:

  • Instead of Small Instance you can choose to run OfficeClip on Micro Instance. This will cost less than half the small instance but it may affect speed at which OfficeClip runs. We tried to run OfficeClip on the Micro Instance and did not see any significant degradation (with a single user logged in!).
  • Amazon also has an auction system called Spot Instances where you can bid for the instance price and the instance will be allocated whenever you win the bid. However, Amazon will remove the instance if someone, at a later time, bid more than yours. We found Spot Instances to be good for short term testing.

• Note that you must close or terminate all unused assets (instances, volumes etc.) as amazon bills for every active assets hourly.

Edited by user Saturday, August 28, 2021 11:17:39 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified