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OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI’m surprised ONLYOFFICE isn’t more popular in more distributions. It’s AGPL, open source, and almost infinitely more intuitive than LibreOffice to anyone coming from Microsoft Office.
- Saris 3y agoAre the desktop apps open source too? I have a faint memory of only their document server being open source or something like that.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoSure are. https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors The headless server is Apache, the client and visual elements AGPL, which might be the confusion.
- mofosyne 3y agoCould the offline editor interface with the online editor? Would be handy for a hybrid approach for reliability purposes.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI don’t believe that they have very much proprietary code. I know that if you spin up their document server “community edition,” it has a limit of 20 simultaneous users without a support subscription. This, however, can easily be legally patched around. It’s more just to make a point that it’s not supported without talking to them about a proper deployment. They also might have some code that is proprietary to make that large deployment easier, but it’s not required as long as you don’t mind the AGPL. You can actually try this yourself with their NextCloud plugin. LibreOffice also has a cloud version available but it’s… let’s just say, in my opinion, it’s very bad.
- circuit10 3y agoYou can open documents stored online in the desktop editors but there’s no offline syncing or anything so it effectively just opens a browser tab
- Saris 3y agoOh nice!
- flashback2199 3y agoThanks, your comments convinced me to finally download and apt install
- JadeNB 3y ago> I’m surprised ONLYOFFICE isn’t more popular in more distributions. It’s AGPL, open source, and almost infinitely more intuitive than LibreOffice to anyone coming from Microsoft Office. As someone who doesn't even know MS Office well enough to know what I'm missing, what's unintuitive about LibreOffice to someone who knows MS Office?
- icegreentea2 3y agoLooks like OnlyOffice uses a ribbon UI that looks to be pretty well modeled on the MS Office pattern. Somewhat better preservation of muscle memory. I am not saying that Libreoffice has a worse interface (or really 'unintuitive').. Just more different from MS Office.
- lights0123 3y agoLibreOffice also offers one that's fairly decent, just not enabled by default. It has many other modes as well: https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2023/01/Enable-ribbon-tabbed-view-in-LibreOffice.png https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2023/01/Enable-ribbon-tab...
- mixmastamyk 3y agoIt's quite intuitive if you learned on Office '97 or anything up to '07. If you learned on '07+, you might want a ribbon interface instead. But LO has that available; not sure how good it is.
- dhc02 3y agoMy only serious gripe with OnlyOffice is that when opening a CSV, you have to choose an encoding and delimiter, and there is no way to set a default. You must click twice, in two places, every single time you open a CSV.
- Hitton 3y agoI've just tried opening csv in LibreOffice and it asked me for it too. However sane options were already selected so it was just one additional click.
- PrayagBhakar 3y agoYou have to do this with Excel as well to avoid your data automagically being formatted and/or truncated.
- ale42 3y agoSo true... opening a CSV in Excel is like playing the lottery. Sometimes it opens fine, sometimes not, it even depends on the character encoding of the CSV and whether you double-click the file, open it or drag it inside Excel. Sometimes you get the "import text file" window where you have to choose the delimiter, sometimes everything gets in a single column, and sometimes you get what you want.
- ElectricalUnion 3y agoCSV is not a standard (rfc4180 exists but only very few things actually pay attention to it) so no behavior is a sane behavior when trying to import it.
- stonogo 3y agoYou sound like a C compiler. "This is technically undefined behavior so whatever" is not a useful guiding principle for user interfaces.
- ElectricalUnion 3y ago
- _atreeonmyhouse 3y agoThere is some confusion here. The linked GitHub repo clearly says Apache License, but their commercial website does say AGPL. They're not even remotely similar. The AGPL is regarded as so toxic that nearly all companies where office suites matter, place it on a "do not use" list. It's a good way to artificially limit your potential customers. It doesn't matter that they have a page saying "sure go ahead and use it internally" - most places won't touch it with a 10m pole, by policy.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoThe document server is Apache, but the editors and visual components are AGPL.
- kstrauser 3y agoThat’s so sad. I’d hate to work at a shop that wouldn’t allow AGPL’d software for internal tooling. What a completely legally unnecessary, productivity-hobbling decision. Perhaps the best feature of the AGPL is that it predominately hampers companies with ineffective legal departments.
- _atreeonmyhouse 3y agoOne of the most notable examples is Google.
- kstrauser 3y agoPity. They said it’s because they’re afraid someone outside Google would use it, which is legitimate for companies without sufficient technical SBOL controls to prevent using third party software in violation of its terms. Their take is basically “we don’t have a way to keep our internal software internal, so you can’t use it at all, ever, for anything”. I wouldn’t have expected that of them.
- hedora 3y agoThat makes sense. GPL 3 is basically a non-starter for people that ship hardware, but is fine for people that provide web services. AGPL would level the playing field between Google and device manufacturers and on-prem software companies (like Apple and Microsoft). Of course they don’t want their employees to use and indirectly support that ecosystem! I wish they’d produce a GPL 4 that is closer to the AGPL. v3 backfired and is severely hurting end-users’ freedom in practice.
- pkz 3y agoI hear the company owner is a russian citizen. Maybe that is a problem.
- ognarb 3y agoThe company has quite some links to Russia. Until recently it was owned by a Russian company but headquartered in Riga, now they seems to have moved the headquarters in Singapore according to this Wikipedia edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1172666163 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/117266616... (which I'm not sure I can trust completely as there as been multiple attempt to remove any mention of Russia on that page) But if I had to guess, the major development effort is still done in Russia.
- Karellen 3y ago> I’m surprised ONLYOFFICE isn’t more popular in more distributions. There's an RFP/ITP (Request For Package/Intent To Package) issue for Debian filed in June 2020, but no evidence that any DDs have wanted to pick it up or start working on it. I guess LibreOffice works well enough for all of them that need it. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=963070 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=963070 > It's [...] more intuitive than LibreOffice to anyone coming from Microsoft Office. I've just had a look at some of the OnlyOffice screenshots, and they mostly look like it has a Ribbon-style interface. It might be that Debian devs are mostly old-school enough that LibreOffice's classic menu and toolbars is more similar to the MS Office they used to use than a Ribbon. That said, LibreOffice does have multiple User Interface variants (accessible from the "View" menu in the standard UI), including a "Tabbed" option that is Ribbon-like if that's more your thing. (And some others, but I've not explored them much.)
- dcsommer 3y agoAnyone have a good comparison between this and LibreOffice?
- euniceee3 3y agoOnly Office can run in a cloud-based capacity. Think Office 365 that is able to be self-hosted.
- coder543 3y agohttps://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_Online https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_... There have been various efforts to bring LibreOffice to the web, but I haven’t tested anything in a long time, so I can’t say if it works well.
- the_third_wave 3y agoThey work quite well, I've been using it (Collabora + "richdocuments" in Nextcloud) for a number of years now.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoWhy would you want to?
- circuit10 3y agoOne reason is that it’s more convenient to use on computers you don’t own and can’t install software on, and other is you can share things with people without them needing to install it to view or edit your documents
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoOK, the first one I can understand. The second one... installing an open-source package that runs on almost everything doesn't seem like that big a deal. But those are reasonable answers. I would rather see engineering effort go into fixing bugs in the suite, but I realize that the people volunteering to "Web-enable" the software aren't necessarily the ones who'd be fixing unrelated bugs.
- amuseee 3y agoWhen I used OnlyOffice (2020-ish, shipped default with Manjaro), it was really laggy and buggy and barely opened. I don't know if it's better now, since most of my work is on the browser GSuite
- roshin 3y agohttps://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19 https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19 I'm still waiting for this 7 year issue. I have doubts about how open source this is. Based on the comments, someone created a PR to support RTL, but the maintainers refused to review it.
- josephcsible 3y agoThe responsiveness of maintainers to PRs has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it's actually open source.
- hollerith 3y agoTrue: the license is the only thing that matters for whether it is open-source or not.
- slim 3y agoit could be too much effort to implement RTL
- komali2 3y agohttps://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19#issuecomment-318054202 https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19#issue... > @ONLYOFFICE, FYI to add bidi-directional support (LTR, RTL and mixed) in Web interface is as simple to add to element dir=auto. > If I remember correctly, they are using canvas with custom rendering logic. Hence many native browser capabilities might not be available. Oh, jeez, why? I want to install this just to point a screen reader at it and watch the havoc. Maybe they got that figured out but good lord...
- thayne 3y agoBecause that is basically what you have to do if you want a truly rich editor that works and looks consistently across browsers and operating systems. Maybe today you could get something to work using a combination of contenteditable and canvas, with code to handle the inconsistencies between browsers. But I know that at least a few years ago, rendering to a canvas was a necessity for rich web apps like this. Google docs at least used to be canvas based as well. I'm not sure if that is still the case.
- revskill 3y agoDo you have demo with React at https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/document-editor-react https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/document-editor-react ? Seems promising !
- smirya0 3y agoOnly missing a real Outlook competitor (EWS).
- mixmastamyk 3y agoWasn't expecting to like it when I clicked the link, but it doesn't look bad at all. Interesting that it's written in C#.
- todotask 3y agoI tried to work with OnlyOffice for most of spreadsheet, the only drawback is long-loading time whenever you open a file compare to Microsoft Office web based I can get on Koofr cloud storage for free and get the best of both world. When I need to fill PDF form, Microsoft Edge could work fine.
- zoom6628 3y agoMy experience is exact opposite. I use OnlyOffice as default tool to open office documents because it's blinding fast on Linux( home systems) and macos (work). I don't need 98% of the features in MS Office so OnlyOffice has just what I want. And a brilliant integration with draw.io which makes documentation a breeze. I did not know was a Russian company so shall now rethink my use.
- todotask 3y agoMost of us don't need 80% of the featured in MS Office too, until I realize it cost less than 15USD to get full office suite for our business, make sense for business. But wow, I didn't knew OnlyOffice is manage by company in Singapore where I live.
- vpaulus 3y agoSomehow it is not the Word/Excel file readability why I must buy Office license. But the Teams.
- raulo 3y ago[flagged]
- kaliqt 3y agoStill good software, still using it.
- troyvit 3y agoI've been using it for 3 years comrade and I still prefer Russian snooping to Alphabet snooping or Microsoft security lapses. I'd rather get Collabra going via Nextcloud but my laziness stops me.
- alpenbazi 3y agonot in any way
- CSDude 3y agoI don't know, let me use my Cisco switch to browse internet which was disassembled at FBI.
- l-albertovich 3y agoBe sure to put it behind a palo alto firewall which is by no means backdoored by the IDF!
- high_5 3y agoThe article from the link does not provide any evidence to support the statement "The Company however is russian". Does anyone else have any info on this accusation?
- lstamour 3y agoOriginal link (without Translate): https://www.epravda.com.ua/publications/2022/07/6/688888/ https://www.epravda.com.ua/publications/2022/07/6/688888/ Excerpt via Google translate, though the whole thing might be worth a read via Google translate or ChatGPT or whatnot: > The majority of OnlyOffice employees are citizens of Russia who are in this country or hold positions in the Latvian and Russian offices at the same time. > The developers of OnlyOffice in the Russian information space emphasize that the Latvian Ascensio System SIA is a one hundred percent daughter and one hundred percent property of the Russian company NKT. The open database of Lursoft companies registered in Latvia also points to a Russian beneficiary. Google translate: https://www-epravda-com-ua.translate.goog/publications/2022/07/6/688888/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-epravda-com-ua.translate.goog/publications/2022/... via Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/10nqq8m/onlyoffice_is_a_russian_company_with_deep_ties_to/j6b84ga/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/10nqq8m/onlyoffice...
- dnedic 3y agoFor what it's worth, my wife just finished her Master's thesis using this suite, she had very little adjustment time needed moving from Word.