Open-source cloud with LibreOffice online | Hacker News Reader

Open-source cloud with LibreOffice online

open365.io

114 pointsashitlerferad72 comments

Is there an overview of this thing that doesn't require me to watch a video?

("A photo tells a thousand words", but I can read at 300-400 words/minute while a video typically conveys roughly 100 wpm. I don't like wasting my time and bandwidth.)

The video is just someone using LibreOffice in a browser. It's got file versioning and sharing and local sync that looks a lot like Dropbox. They also bolted on email and calendar features which look familiar but I can't place them. Quite impressive for a tech demo but hardly riveting. There's no narration at all.

Does it support multiple people editing the same document at the same time?

It always amazes me how so many people don't get that this is really the central feature or Google Docs. My workplace is evaluating "productivity solutions" in some arcane months-long process, and I'd have been happy to just pick Google on day 1 because the other "solutions," despite being "cloud" solutions, still only let one person at a time edit anything. Morons in charge.

My day-job went through a similar exercise...and they even got us excited by proposing a pilot where some numbers of employees would use google apps for a couple of months, while some other employees would pilot Microsoft's online offering. Then the higher-ups would garner feedback, and pick the one that most thought was productive, etc. We actually never got to test google apps, the pilot got killed. Word is that the MS office online solution will be implemented...to which i reacted like you stated, "Morons in charge"...and then someone in the office reminded me that sometimes in corporate world, tech decisions are not always about functionality but about existing (and potential) license agreements. Maybe the company's corporate software vendor or microsoft sales team offered a financial deal that was overall better (our corporate laptops run windows OS) for the company.

Microsoft's online apps allow simultaneous editing.

We chose them, having heard terrible things about Google's support (or rather, lack of it). Having experienced Microsoft's support, we are now surprisingly close to switching to Google on the basis that it can't possibly be worse.

Google's support is a little worse, owing primarily to the fact that there is none, but Google's software has fewer headaches. And after about 8 months on Office 365 I can tell you that the most common useful help I get from MS support is along the lines of "you're right, you can't do that in Office 365, you can stop futilely searching now."

Here is a fun thing with Office365. Let's say you want not just to edit a document concurrently, but to see everybody's changes. It doesn't work right in Word online:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Can-I-use-Track-Cha...

I was pretty shocked to learn this. Although it seems calculated to cause you to buy a premium license, so I suppose I shouldn't be.

From what we were able to tell you couldn't/can't simultaneously edit a Word doc in 365. But it's also possible that it's more complicated than we expected, I guess. Or that the feature's since been added.

Google doesn't really have human support, for pretty much anything.

Well... in our case it wouldn't actually cost us anything to use Google, but it will cost us to use other options.

On mobile so i cannot réelle élaborate but Google for 'onlyOffice'. The company I work for dévelops à sync server / web app that uses it for online collaborative édition

I don't think we will see that on Docx/Xlsx documents (or any other office doc) considering the way it works and the way it is stored.

That's notably missing from the video.

I agree, and that's a disingenuous quote in any case: "A photo tells a thousand words."

There are many cases when the reverse is true.

A photo may be telling a thousand words, but quite often a lot of those words have little value or relevance to the topic.

A photo tells negative one thousand words?

Or a word tells one thousand photos?

I meant the reverse as "a word tells one thousand photos," or can in some cases. Many abstract concepts can be represented by a word in modern human verbal languages, but not so easily only photos.

I think the existence of Pictionary as a game is a decent example of this.

A photo requires a 1000 word explanation

For those interested here is the github repo for the main parts of this solution: https://github.com/LibreOffice/online I've been following this pretty closely, the loolwsd and loleaflet are the server and client component, but you need to have a user (authentication) system on top of that for collaborative editting which can be anything.

Collabora is the main driver behind this project (LibreOffice Online) and has already provided a beta vmdk (based on OwnCloud for the user part) some time ago: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

I do not think it's using LibreOffice Online. You can see kontact running there too. http://i.imgur.com/WOuJyyA.png

Every time I try to use LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before that), I end up terribly disappointed by the software quality compared to 'equivalent' Microsoft or Apple products. Have things improved lately?

OpenOffice is as good as dead atm. LibreOffice, to date, as far as I can tell, mostly focused on fixing the mistakes from OpenOffice days (as in, code cleanups and refacturing the code) and improving the compatibility with Microsoft Office. In those aspects, seems like things have improved quite a bit.

Unfortunately, it still looks like it was made in the year 2000. libreoffice-style-sifr icon pack kind of makes the things a bit less obnoxious, but there's still a long way to go. I've read mixed statements from the LO community about the possible switch to ribbon interface, but even if they decide against it, they need something.

My biggest mistake about the whole LO project is that I somehow ended up on one on their admin mailing lists (for https://ask.libreoffice.org/) and I just can't find a way to remove myself from it. I contacted them five or six times already, and ended up empty handed every single time.

I thought ribbon was really bad for productivity, as it's just a less-effective mega menu, or a mega-menu which hides some options without providing any mechanism to see everything. My understanding was that an application had to go to full mega-menu, with all the options visible, or traditional dropdowns w/ alphabetized groupings and lots of iconongraphy.

You can move the most-common features to the ribbon, which would improve productivity for most people. Of course you'll never hit every use case, but you can make the average case a lot better.

Honestly, in the long run, I feel the ribbon is more or less a productivity wash. Not a huge difference either way. But as with most large rearrangements of UI, familiarity was dealt a blow. Office has had the ribbon for nine years, and with that familiarity back intact, I find no serious issues with it.

God, I hope ribbon isn't on the table. Searchable menus are the way to go, imho. Just give me a good way to pin menu items to the toolbar and I'm happy.

There is no "possible switch to ribbon interface". No matter how the new toolbar interface turns out, it will not replace the sidebar.

I hate that ribbon interface. LibreOffice seems to really hit the mark for UI for me. I guess it really depends what you need, but the only time I've found LO lacking was with filtering a massive spreadsheet (which really should have been in a DB anyways).

Ribbon is really great, but you cannot just use it for free for Office-competing products: "There’s only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can’t obtain the royalty-free license"

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/11/21/licensin...

Except if you probably pay MS a royality fee.

It has gotten considerably better recently but in all honesty it still lags behind MS Office.

That said they did a massive (insanely massive) refactor and removed decades of cruft to whip it into shape and now they are focussing on new features so I expect it to improve pretty rapidly in the next year or two.

Fascinating Tech Talk on the refactor here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5DOOlNN9GU

I have to say yes, things have improved. Perfect for home use; we use it for budget stuff, drafting the typical documents, school stuff for my daughter, etc. But haven't fully tested it with hardcore, crazy sophisticated (business intelligence-level) spreadsheet formulas that one might encounter in the workplace.

Not greatly.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...

I use LibreOffice (mainly Calc) for personal spreadsheets and documents, but the UI is outdated. Worse than the look, I cannot use my familiar Excel keyboard shortcuts and instead have to learn new key combinations to improve my productivity (or use the mouse/trackpad and learn to slow things down). Since my use is occasional, I get surprised many a times when weird stuff happens due to my muscle memory hitting something or doing some action expecting an Excel-like result. :)

I still like LibreOffice (Calc) and the fact that it's actively developed. It's not as bad as StarOffice/OpenOffice was a long time ago, but at the same time it is a bit of a resource hog and startup times are a bit longer compared to MS Office.

I don't want the ribbon interface to be added in LibreOffice. I just want a nice modern looking UI with nice fonts and support for older MS Office (2003 style) keyboard shortcuts.

(The newer MS Office keyboard shortcuts after the advent of the ribbon are horrendous. Every new version loses some more older, quicker shortcuts.)

I haven't used MS Office in about 10 years. To be honest I've never had "quality" issues, unless you're referring to the look and feel of the UI, which yes has come leaps and bounds in that time (although I'd argue you to the grave on that being a more important standard of quality than standards compliance, and MS Office has always been shocking at that. They had to be ordered to implement ODF by the European union if I remember correctly).

It remains quite different in workflow, so the transition will always be jarring, but I find it just as odd going back to MS Office now as you would going the other way.

Libreoffice is awesome

LibreOffice is indeed awesome and I'm really productive with Writer & Calc. But Impress is a real pain. I write something and I always end up with somethink like "Oh dear no I don't want you to do this. Ok, I'll make this trick and hit enter, backspace to avoid magic ... ah no, this time this does not work. Let me just start over and try with pasting from elsewhere .. just the final edit and ... argh"

I think this is libreoffice inside a remote-desktop like, html client. Like VNC. I fact the same company eyeOs is offering Microsoft office "on cloud", something similar as http://guac-dev.org/ My opinion is that this is not html5 editor, It is very high demanding hungry resources consuming and complex architecture. Or I am missing a new release libreoffice HTML5 version?

Actually not VNC, but Spice: http://www.eyeos.com/en/eyeos/technology#clienteweb

You can watch a bit about what is actually is here: http://ftp.fau.de/fosdem/2016/janson/scaling-and-securing-li...

Is this using the "LibreOfficeOnline" thing where you can compile LibreOffice to run a server? Or is this something else?

Also, it says it's open source, but I can't find any links to source downloads or a repo?

Otherwise, I'm keen to see how this works. I'd love to offer business customers a way to self-host documents without telling them they have to install an office suite on every single computer.

On their main website they also have an overview of the used technology: http://www.eyeos.com/en/eyeos/technology#clienteweb

Seems that they are "getting it ready" in a few days.

http://support.open365.io/index.php/en/forum/englishsuport/1...

Weeks. "We are readying repositories. Estimate date... In the next few weeks ^^"

I don't think you should be able to claim something is open source... until the source is open. But maybe that's just me.

What I'm missing most is collaboration, it's been requested time and time again due to Google Apps having such great support for it.

Etherpad does a not bad job at handling real-time collaboration, with the right plugins included. Sandstorm.io is an awesome hosting solution for it.

I just kinda assumed if LibreOffice was announcing a cloud platform it'd be collaborative...

This isn't a LibreOffice announcement FYI. It's a company, and appears to be using desktop installation(s) of LibreOffice and some kind of adapter to render the regular desktop app's window chrome as HTML5.

So, think like XenDesktop or app-specific RDP, rendered to a browser.

IMHO, collaboration will be a hard one to crack. I use MS Office for office work and even they haven't gotten it as good as Google Apps.

Fun, I can't sign up with my email since it ends with '.email'

They actually put in their own email regex........

Be careful with those new tlds though. They do frequent discounts on them and spammers love them cheap domains. I recently had to black-list "*.top" after a Gandi.net discount on it. The day after each discount I receive loads of spam from the discounted tld, blacklisted .top, .eu, .science, .xys, .party so far.

.EU is widely used in the European Union [1], and is over a decade old. You should probably find a better way to block spam than blocking a whole TLD.

[1] e.g. The European Union's own site, http://europa.eu/, and lots of European science projects I've seen.

I use SpamAssassin and a whitelist generated from my contacts. If I had a .eu in my contacts list, that mail would make its way to my inbox, but till now I've only received sneaky spam from it.

In before the cease and desist from Microsoft by calling your product Open365.

Maybe they should make a bit fun about the missing day in years like 2016 and name it Open366.io or OpenYear.io ;)

It gives 20GB space online, which is great. I'm a bit wary of these cloud platforms and have a fear they'd disappear after sometime (like how Ubuntu's did and others have in the past). Anyone know how strong the financials and projections are for this cloud project (not just LibreOffice/Document Foundation overall)? I can't seem to find anything specific on the website.

The website design looks great and it's a shame the video is so rushed by comparison :/

I'm looking for info on who open365.io is. There is no info listed in their website. Where are they located? Who is behind them? How is my data in their cloud protected? Etc etc.

"Linux" and "Ubuntu" seem to be used more and more interchangeably these days. Are there binary/source downloads for other distros?

Were can I find the source code? Is there a Github repo? And is the eyeos tech open source?

Here: https://github.com/LibreOffice/online and here is another thing based on the same components: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

"First open source cloud"? I think not. ownCloud, Sandstorm.io, etc. This is not new territory.

Awesome, sure. First, no.

We took that bit out of the title.

And when microsoft sues for copyright infringment, they will be the bad guys, right?

What copyright infringement?

I guess parent is talking about the use of '365' which reminds of office 365. That would be trademark infringement though, not copyright.

Seems to me that open365 is different enough of office 365 that no confusion is possible anyway but I have no idea what the law says.

You think there is no confusion possible? It's a very obvious knockoff of Microsoft's product. And unlike office, which is kind of generic, the use of 365 for a productivity suite is certainly specific to Microsoft.

365 is a descriptive term used widely to mean 'always available', it's too generic for a registered trademark by itself - Microsoft shouldn't have a hope in a sensible IP court.

It's sad that you can be sued for using numbers.

It's sad that you can't figure out a name which is not an exact replica of your competitor.

And definitely deserves the lawsuit.

MS can't copyright a number.

"Open365" is an obvious knock off of the name "Office365" and MS can probably argue it causes enough customer confusion

I'd say that coming from a company who pushed a standard called "Office Open" to undermine standardization on ODF, that'd be rich.

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