System Requirements

FileHold makes use of typical Microsoft technologies already in place in many offices. The following are the system requirements for FileHold 17.1. Most of these requirements are applicable to FileHold Cloud and Self-hosted customers.

The FileHold Cloud eliminates the need for customers to address the most difficult system requirements. Server requirements are only applicable to Self-hosted systems.

FileHold server (Self-hosted only)

Customers have the option of hosting their FileHold system on their own server. This can be a physical or virtual server and may be located in your datacenter or a third party datacenter. FileHold has been deployed in many virtual environments including VMWare, Citrix, HyperV, etc. A virtual server is the easiest way to self-host a FileHold solution.

A physical server or virtual machine is required to run the server software. FileHold fully supports installation in a Virtual Server environment (VMWare, Citrix, HyperV) or on dedicated hardware in a traditional server deployment.

These US-English language* editions of Windows are supported:

Windows 2022 Standard and Datacenter Edition Server
Windows 2019 Standard and Datacenter Edition Server
Windows 2016 Standard and Datacenter Edition Server with IIS 10

* Do not install a non-US-English language pack.

The FileHold server must be dedicated to running FileHold. This is a requirement for systems to be supported by FileHold and to prevent technical or performance side effects caused by other software. The server operating system should be freshly installed to ensure there are no remnants of old applications. Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, DFS, and or Print Services running on the same server operating system as the FileHold Server are known to cause problems. Windows operating systems for non US-English locales or with non US-English language packs are known not to function correctly. FileHold operates with the privilege of a service user that must be created on the FileHold server or in the domain. This user must have full access to the FileHold areas of the server. It must also have the "Log on as a batch" and "Log on as a service" policies enabled for the FileHold server. The Microsoft Internet Information Server role must be enabled.

Minimum Recommended Hardware Configuration

Two CPU cores
8 GB RAM
Fault tolerant disk system
Gigabit network connection

The minimum recommended configuration will run the minimum FileHold Express system of 5 concurrent users with SQL Server collocated on the same machine as the application server. Larger systems should expect to increase the number of CPU cores and RAM according to the required usage.

There are a few critical usage and configuration scenarios that must be taken into account when sizing a server.

A server where users interact using the web client uses more RAM and CPU than a server with desktop clients.
A mobile web client consumes less resources than a full web client.
Complex searches and reports can consume a lot of RAM and CPU resources.
A fast disk system is critical to good performance.
Larger systems should run the application server and the database server on different machines.
The allowance for disk capacity should include the recommended amounts for the base operating system and approximately 750 MB for the FileHold application. The document repository size will be dependent on the average size of documents that will be stored. FileHold does not add any size overhead to the storage of documents beyond what is needed to store them in the file system. If the documents will contain text, then at least one third of the document size should be reserved for the full text search indexes. FileHold databases are relatively small depending on the number and size of user defined metadata fields. There should be a minimum allowance of 50 MB for the databases. For good disk performance, the total used area of a hard drive should not exceed 85%. The minimum free disk space allowed for FileHold is 10%. For best results store FileHold data on a different logical drive than the one used for the operating system.

The database server can run on the same machine as the FileHold server or on an independent machine. For best performance FileHold should be the only databases on the database server, but it can coexist with other applications when the appropriate performance considerations are taken into account. If the SQL server will be installed on a different machine from the FileHold server it is recommended that the servers belong to a domain rather than a workgroup.

The following versions of SQL Server are currently supported:

SQL Server 2022 Enterprise, Express, and Standard
SQL Server 2019 Enterprise, Express, and Standard
SQL Server 2017 Enterprise, Express, and Standard
SQL Server 2016 Enterprise, Express, and Standard
SQL Server 2014 (64 bit) Enterprise, Express, and Standard

Regardless of version, collation must be set to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.

Optional No Cost Database Server For FileHold Express
Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Express Edition is free from Microsoft and is suitable for trials, demos, and may be suitable for small or entry level systems with less than 20 users and low volume usage. With SQL Express, the database must run on the same server as the FileHold Application Server. Download 2022 Express from the Microsoft download page. When asked, you should choose the download including the database engine, SQL management tools, and reporting services: Express with Advanced Services (SQLEXPRADV).

Client requirements (FileHold Cloud and self-hosted)

FileHold offers three main types of clients for use with FileHold Cloud or Self-hosted solutions. It also has two desktop client add-ons. All desktop clients have a minimum resolution of 1024 x 768.

The desktop browser is required for many administration tasks.

Mozilla Firefox – current version
Google Chrome – current version
Microsoft Edge – current Chromium version
Safari – current version on Mac

The FDA is required to use the FileScan Bridge, local watched folders and offline files. A complete list of differences between the FDA and browser clients is available.

Windows 10 (32 and 64 bit) Professional and Enterprise editions
Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise editions
Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022

iOS – current version
Android – current version

The mobile client uses HTML 5 with a small screen size so it is expected that many devices will work correctly even if they are not officially supported.

Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021 (32 and 64-bit) (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Visio Standard 2021 (32 and 64-bit))
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 (32 and 64 bit) (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, OneNote)
Microsoft Office Professional 2016 (32 and 64 bit) (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, OneNote)

Office or Microsoft 365 is not a unique version of Microsoft Office. It is a subscription purchase plan for a number of Office products. If you download and install the desktop version of one of the Office versions shown above under the Office 365 subscription, it will be supported.^{1 2}

¹ Out-of-process add-ins/applications are stand-alone programs, scripts, or applications that use Office object model APIs to start functionality in the application and integrate with Office. In this case, the out-of-process application drives Office. Out-of-process applications are not supported in Click-to-Run for Office. The email functionality in the FileHold Desktop Application (FDA) uses out-of-process technology. This means the email functionality in the FileHold Desktop Application is not supported for Click to Run versions. See the Microsoft website for more information.

² "New Outlook" is not a desktop application and not supported. Do not check the "Try the new Outlook" button or your desktop application will be replaced by the web version and the integration with FileHold will not be available.

Print to FileHold (P2F) is an optional virtual PDF printer that requires the FDA.

Windows 10 (32 and 64 bit) - Professional and Enterprise editions
Windows 11 - Pro and Enterprise editions
Windows Server* 2016, 2019, 2022

* Standalone server desktop only.

Document Scanning and Indexing

FileHold provides many options for front end document processing using our FileScan Bridge. SmartSoft Capture ships with every FileHold system with Capture Plus as a simple upgrade. Multi-user scanning an indexing solutions are also available from SmartSoft. Contact [email protected] for more information.

SmartSoft Capture

Applies to SmartSoft Capture and Capture Plus which are single workstation solutions.

Microsoft Windows 10
4 - 8 GB RAM
Minimum 2 core processor at 2Ghz / recommended: 4 cores at 3Ghz or more
500 MB free space at minimum
TWAIN driver for scanner (documents can also be indexed directly from PDF or image files).

Other Feature Options

Validated with single tenant Microsoft Entra ID OAuth authentication. Multi-tenant Entra ID and other OAuth providers such as Okta, Auth0 and SecureAuth may be supported. Contact [email protected] for more information. Optionally, users can be automatically provisioned by email via self-registration and groups can be automatically assigned using role or group claims. Single sign on works equally with FileHold browser and desktop clients.

A contract with DocuSign for their e-signature services. Contact [email protected] for information on how to engage with DocuSign.
Your DocuSign contract needs to allow API access. Several DocuSign contract types support this. You can use individual or group authentication. DocuSign can provide a trial to let you try their service with FileHold.
FileHold server needs to be accessible to DocuSign. Your FileHold server will need to be setup for receiving HTTPS messages from one of DocuSign's IP addresses. If you have a FileHold Cloud server, this is enabled by default.
Digital signature enabled in your FileHold system license.

A contract with Adobe for their e-signature services. Contact [email protected] for information on how to engage with Adobe.
Your Adobe Acrobat Sign contract needs to allow full API access. This will normally mean an enterprise edition contract. Adobe Acrobat Sign can provide a trial to let you try their service with FileHold.
FileHold server needs to be accessible to Adobe Acrobat Sign. Your FileHold server will need to be setup for receiving HTTPS messages from one of Adobe's IP addresses. If you have a FileHold Cloud server, this is enabled by default.
Digital signature enabled in your FileHold system license.

Tested with the Active Directory basic functional set that ships with our supported Windows Server versions. Other Active Directory servers may also be supported. Contact [email protected] for more information.

Used to synchronize the user authentication system with Microsoft Active Directory and authenticate users against a domain. Users from multiple active directory domains can be synchronized with FileHold with up to one OU per domain. FileHold Cloud customers will need to integrate their Active Directory domain with their FileHold Cloud server using a VPN or similar mechanism.

Users must have a Microsoft license to use Teams, a FileHold external authentication license connected to Microsoft Entra Authentication, and must log in to FileHold using their Microsoft 365 user. For FileHold 17.0, a separate installation is needed for Teams integration.