A major requirement for electronic publishing systems is the availability of rich and intuitive mechanisms that enhance the user experience of viewing and searching online electronic documents such as books, monographs and journal papers. This work concerns a set of infrastructural components and their utilization for the creation of related coherent services and features for end users. We present a set of sophisticated platforms, tools and mechanisms that have been employed in real-life cases for implementing document viewing and full-text search features, shared among application instances of various types. Challenges encountered and the provided solutions are discussed.