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Comment by karambir | Hacker News Reader

I believe we should also support more open-source software here. Google Docs are in no doubt best and provide a lot of good functionality to its users. Even Office(365?) is getting good. LibreOffice is developing an online version[1] which is at alpha stage I would say.

I recently installed Collabora Online(a packaged version of LibreOffice Online) on my Nextcloud server and it is working fine for basic document editing. And with Nextcloud, I am also able to get comments and chat on the side[2]. Maybe they can integrate this feature more into documents/files.

1. https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

2. https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-introduces-collaborativ...

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Have you tried OnlyOffice? Integrates with nextcloud as well. Licenced unter AGPLv3 and works really good. I used Collabora before but i prefere OnlyOffice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice

This is great. I looked at it previously but leaned towards LibreOffice for my case. I will try it.

CryptPad [0] provides end-to-end encryption for collaboration on documents. It seems that the server will have some metadata, but no access to content. It would require some development to integrate with existing workflows, but the foundation seems solid.

If you don’t want your data encrypted at rest, self-hosting with Sandstorm [1] would be a good choice.

Though it hasn’t happened yet (to my knowledge), putting CryptPad and Sandstorm together seems like a natural next step.

[0]: https://cryptpad.fr

[1]: https://sandstorm.io

Edit: fix footnote numbering

I thought Sandstorm was shutting down? YUNOHOST seems cool https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps

The hosted-as-a-service version of Sandstorm is shutting down. Self-hosted Sandstorm will keep running as long as you want it to.

I've never understood the whole cloud hype.

Am I the only one who uses a (bridging) VPN to provide me with LAN-level access to an office-server, running Samba and locally hosting the office documents?

With Linux, OpenVPN and LibreOffice, my running costs are zero, and if you can install this yourself, so are your installation costs.

Wasn't this the standard before the cloud hype began? Was it too expensive/complicated/no experts available for SMOs?

You can always use a third party plugin like SyncDocs [1] to do end-to-end encryption of Google Docs.

[1] https://www.syncdocs.com/google-drive-encryption-faq/

Although I have not tried it, there is also an office suite from KDE called Calligra : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligra

> I believe we should also support more open-source software here.

Yes, I concur.

> Google Docs are in no doubt best and provide a lot of good functionality to its users. Even Office(365?) is getting good. LibreOffice is developing an online version[1] which is at alpha stage I would say.

I'm having trouble understanding how you think Google Docs or Office 365 are open source.

I am sorry I was not clear with the language. I was trying to put current market players(opensource or not) and compare them with an open source initiative i.e. LibreOffice Online.

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