Collaboration Services Administration

To install the ARDI Collaboration Services for a particular site or database, you'll need two installers.

1) The Collaboration Service installer, and
2) The Collaboration Addin installer

The first installs the actual collaboration services - the infrastructure to exchange messages between your various users.

The second installs the addin that allows you to point your ARDI server towards your collaboration server.

The collaboration services installer is designed for systems that already include the ARDI server.

To install on an ARDI server, you simply need to run the ARDI Collaboration Services installer.

This will install the required files and start a collaboration service on port 450.

For servers that do not have ARDI installed, you will need to install an up-to-date copy of Python 2.7, plus the modules Twisted and Autobahn.

While it is possible to deploy the collaboration service on a standalone VM, Python 2.7 and several modules such as Twisted and Autobahn are required.

These can either be downloaded as installers, loaded from python wheels, or installed via PIP

pip install twisted autobahn

1) Install the addin on the ARDI server machine
2) Go to Administration on the server web interface and choose 'Addons'.
3) Enable the 'Collaboration' addon.
4) Choose 'Collaboration Settings' in the Administration menu
5) Enter the server details for the collaboration server. The default port number is 450.
6) If you are sharing one collaboration server across multiple ARDI systems, you might also need to add a Default Group (usually named after your database).

For example, if you have Plant Alpha and Plant Beta as two separate databases but only want to deploy a single Collaboration server, those users can be given a default group of 'Alpha' and 'Beta', respectively.

By default, the Collaboration Server uses ports 450 (Mumble Control TCP Protocol), 451 (REST TCP Protocol) and 1229 (Voice UDP Protocol).

Clients PC-based clients usually require access to port 450. Mobile clients (and PC-based clients that are unable to access port 450) will attempt to access the REST service on port 451 if 450 is unavailable.

The ARDI server itself needs to be able to access the REST protocol (port 451). If this port is blocked between the ARDI server and the Collaboration server, a significant slowdown of web services will occur.

If you are thinking of running on non-standard ports or would like to run additional instances of the collaboration server for different sites, see the Non-Standard Ports for the Collaboration Service documentation.