virdev

Shout out to Yjs, ProseMirror and BlockNote on which we relied to build LaSuite Docs

For sure

Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported. When you think of it it’s really bad for information security. On the plus side doing everything in the browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better real time collab and can include a lot more interactive content.

Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we’ve made it top the first page again! Thanks for the interest :)

I’ve compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...

Cheers!

Congrats! It's a huge win that they trust it enough to roll it to all public servant (which means 2 to 5 million people if I'm correct). Kudos to @theflash666_ for building it!

Cool tracks homebrewed by La Suite Numérique Team. Help us build the open source digital workspace. Come and be a part of a the digital autonomy revolution

Cool! Let us know how it goes would love to see you in the contributors :)

Hey! Docs’s PM here.

IMO Notion really made an awesome job with real-time, collab features (comments, suggestions) and useful AI actions. So much, people only see databases ^^.

For now we’ll be focusing on these. That’s already plenty ^^ Further down road we’ll if we manage to take on databases.

Hey there! Thanks for the comment. I have to disagree with you. For government and large legs it makes less and less sense to just pay for licences. If you pay per user it becomes a huge chunk of your budget AND you have no control on your IT nor the budget to hire people. In the context we live and especially in Europe it also make no sense to opt for an American vendor who has to give access to US gov if asked to. And for small orgs I don’t see why there’d be no large mutualized instance that everyone can use for a reasonable price that pays for the ops team running it + server expenses.

Hey! The Netherlands joined recently. Let’s hope more countries follow

Hey, we dedided to take an approach where we build on top of libraries like BlockNotejs, Yjs, HocusPocus but build our own wrapper around it in Django and Next.js. This allows to iterate really fast and to catter our own need (we are large organizations we don't have the same as startups or SMEs). Contributing and sponsoring allows us to make improvement that help the whole collaborative software category.

> The French government agency ANCT Données et Territoires has also made significant contributions to the codebase.

From the Grist-core readme : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

Hey! Thanks for your interest. It's directly funded by the governments. BlockNotejs (the library doing the editor bit) received some funding from NGI. And now France and Germany are sponsoring the project (and also Yjs) No plugins plans for now. You can use your self-hosted OIDC, when you run the project locally you'll see a Keycloak as first screen. Let us know if you get it running docs@numerique.gouv.fr would love to hear your feedback as a reuser.

We plan on getting e2ee as we have the military are interested in using it. From what we investigated there will be some tradeoff feature wise (attribution of edits will be harder for example). Happy to receive some help on that front.

Do you any idea of how much collaborative suites cost to government every year? 10's if not 100's of millions! They have millions of public servents. The investement to build Docs is a drop of water in the the ocean in comparison.

What's complex for most users that do not spend their days into an IDE is not seing what's your prose is going to look like and they've been use to that for a couple decade. For us it kind of made sense to support markdown + giving giving a minimalistic toolbar for users who don't know how to md. Also, you can do a lot of things in BlockNotejs you can't unless you code html and css in md (colors, blocks etc.)

Hey! Not a developer but here are a couple pointers. As Yousef says below, the text editing bit is hard. We wanted to be build fast and BlockNotejs makes it easy, you get the block stucture, the slash command, you can style your editor and extend with custom blocks. The BlockNotejs team researched the live editing space thoroughly so we could just follow the tracks: BlockNotejs, HocusPocus, Yjs. We "just" had to build the wrapper around with authentication, docs permissions and search and boom you have Docs!

Hey! Thanks! Yes we do plan to support more languages, we want the project to be usable by the many. Translations are here : https://crowdin.com/project/lasuite-docs (just added turkish tonight ;)

Hey! Yes we do, we plan to release sub-docs before the end of the month. That will allow you to create trees of docs (with as many child / grand-child as you want) all inheriting the user rights of the parent.

The notes are stored in Y.doc format because we use Yjs for our collaboration server. https://docs.yjs.dev/api/y.doc

Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!

Maybe you are not building something in the sector but do you have any idea of how shitty collaborative work is for public agents ?

The possibility of data being sifoned back to the US if they use american cloud services has millions of public agents not being able to collaborate online.

Some of them try to provide on premise versions of the software but Microsoft want you so bad to pay for 365 or teams that they are willing to maintain only super old versions.

I spoke with a guy reponsible for 100k public agents who told me his only choice is to host Sharepoint 2011 (in 2025 !)

So maybe Docs is not as innovative as Notion but hey, we need as efficient as we can public servants. And we will do that by providing modern tools they can use online with their colleagues.

+ When we think of Microsoft we think about the Office Suite but in lot of cases they do the authentication with Active Directory. Go luck doing interoperability or SSO accross agencies when all of them rely on closed source code and are locked in by vendors...

We're actually solving with OIDC identity federation called ProConnect.

> We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things

Yes! And you'd be surprised by the kind of talent we're able to attract. People want cool stuff to be built by the public. After all its also their money that's being spent. But you need to provide the right environment for their talent not to go waste and thats not easy.

Yes yes yes and yes Public Money Public Code!

Docs actually thanks to the open source grant system we have in Europe. The hard part in a project like Docs is the text editor. We built Docs on top of [Blocknotejs](https://www.blocknotejs.org/) an [NGI funded](https://ngi.eu/funded_solution/blocknote/) library. NGI (Next Generation Internet) and NLNet has been doing an amazing job funding thousands of projects and we are seing the amazing results today. NGI is a program of the European Union

I also have to disagree here.

What Notion has built is amazing.

When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft Office. I say it's not

This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this community’s work. If I ever get anywhere close to their level I’ll consider myself lucky. They do important work and I hope they continue for may years .

I’m not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has changed.

As it came online, it became collaborative.

What’s replacing Microsoft isn’t perfectly similar alternatives to text editing, spreadsheets and slides which are tools that were made for formatting more than content editing.

These were meant to be printed to be shared.

What’s actually replacing Microsoft Office are tools like Notion.

Nowadays content is created in real time with 4, 6 or more pair of hands typing at the same time. ⌨

The way we actually replace Microsoft Office is by building products that follow the change in usage like Notion has been doing.

That’s what we need to do as an opensource community.

Adopting Notion won't do in times like we're living as states (hell, all of us!) we need strategic digital autonomy.

The product of our collaborative work is knowledge, we can't have it siphoned because it's sitting on an American server.

Notion has been leading the content over form revolution for a while now.

But revolutions are our thing right ?

We like to start them, but it's way more fun when they spread to the whole continent

Want to join us or support us with a little GitHub https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs