Shinydocs Pro Pre-Installation Checklist

The purpose of this checklist is to determine the readiness of an environment for a Shinydocs® Pro deployment. A project start may be dependent on the completion of this checklist. 

A successful implementation requires a dedicated virtual machine or bare-metal system. A single-machine configuration supports up to 40 TB of your data from various sources.

Operating System

Shinydocs Pro is designed for Microsoft Windows:

• Windows Server 2019 or newer

• Windows 10 or 11

Hardware

Software 

This software will be automatically installed when you follow the Shinydocs® Pro installation: 

• Shinydocs® Search Engine 

• Shinydocs® Dashboards 

• Shinydocs® Extraction Service 

• Shinydocs® Control Center 

• Shinydocs® Search 

• Java 21 Runtime Environment 

• Microsoft® .NET Desktop runtime 8

• Microsoft® .NET ASP Core runtime 8

• Microsoft® Visual C++ Redistributable 

Access

Scanning file share content requires that the file share(s) are on the same domain as the computer running Shinydocs Pro.

Please Note: Shinydocs® Pro works best with a service account with read (for scanning) and write (for file deletion) access in your desired repository. For file share scanning, the service account will need interactive logon enabled (Group Policy dependent).

Configuring The Service Account

“A service account is a user account that is created explicitly to provide a security context for services running on Windows Server operating systems. The security context determines the service's ability to access local and network resources. The Windows operating systems rely on services to run various features.”

Source: Microsoft Windows Service Accounts

As it pertains to Shinydocs Pro the following services can be found in the Services App:

• Shinydocs Control Center

• Shinydocs Dashboards

• Shinydocs Search

• Shinydocs Extraction Service

• Shinydocs Search Engine

To effectively and securely scan your file share(s), Shinydocs Pro requires a Windows Service Account to be set up in your Active Directory. This will allow the Shinydocs applications to have access to the files on your file share(s) as well run as the service account on the server where Shinydocs Pro is installed.

Services Account used for the following services:

• Shinydocs Control Center

• Shinydocs Dashboards

• Shinydocs Search

Optionally:

• Shinydocs Search Engine

• Shinydocs Extraction Service

The permissions for the account are as follows:

If extracting PST files is required, the Service Account will need write access to the File Share to extract the data within the PST file.

Default Ports

The following ports are required to be accessible for Shinydocs Pro though some* may not require access external to the server on a basic deployment.

The Search Engine, on a single system deployment will only require localhost (127.0.0.1) access as would the Extraction Service. If customizations or additional servers are configured for Cognitive Toolkit or scaling up is required there ports may need to be opened though restrictions are advised to limit access to those specific servers.

Endpoint Protection Considerations

Endpoint protection includes anti-malware, anti-virus, and other file scanning loss prevention software. For the performance and stability of Shinydocs Pro, ensure you have set up the proper exclusions with your organization’s endpoint protection solution. While these items should be scanned before they are installed, we do not recommend day-to-day operation without exclusions.

Endpoint protection software can be configured to accommodate the needs of Shinydocs Pro and manage exceptions. Please refer to your software’s documentation to help implement these exclusions.

Your installation locations may be different if you changed the <installation folder> during installation, the default is the C:\Program Files\Shinydocs Professional\ folder.

Path Exclusions

• <installation folder>

  • \ControlCenter
    \Dashboards
    \ExtractionService
    \Search
    \SearchEngine
    

  • C:\ProgramData\Shinydocs
    \ControlCenter
    \ExtractionService
    \logs
    \OpenSearchService
    \search
    

  • Also, if the index has been moved to it’s own location, i.e. E:\ShinyIndex\data, this should be excluded as well.