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Owncloud 6 Brings Collaborative Open Document Format Editing to the Web
OwnCloud version six was released last week, and part of the release was a pretty major new feature: real-time collaborative editing of ODF documents (the format used by Libreoffice, Calligra, etc.). Although Etherpad has supported collaborating on simple text document for a while now, this is the first Free Software equivalent to Google Docs. From the article: "WebODF is a javascript library that lets you display ODF files in your browser. Think of it as PDF.js, but for ODF. You just throw a webodf.js script on your server, and do a couple of javascript calls to render an ODF file. It works completely client-side, no serverside ODF processing required. ... The collaborative server, included with OwnCloud Documents, lets users join a 'session', which is basically a document with a history of edit operations. Operations are small units of edits (think 'commits'). In a collaborative session, we use Operational Transformation techniques to make sure that operations fired by various clients will eventually result in a consistent state everywhere. When a new client joins an existing session, all earlier operations are played-back for it to reach the current state. Note that this editing is not turn-based; this is true inline collaborative editing where users can join a document and start editing straight away."
As always, source is available.
Wake me up, when it supports the dropbox API, so I can add some hosts entries and be done with that crap.
Or when it is significantly different than google apps ...
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
The significant differences would be:
1) it's open source, and
2) it's self hosted, so you don't have to trust Google with your data (but at the same time, you probably wont have the reliability that comes with trusting Google with your data).
Seems like a boon for a open source LMS like moodle or canvas
Wonder if anyone is planning on doing an LTI with it... hrm.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
It already supports Dropbox as external storage.
This could be really useful for business use, where you don't want Google to know your business plans. What does the server-side component look like? The demo site lets you edit .odf in your browser, but you can't push it back to the server.
I think this is a real game changer. Up to now, if you want document colaberation you have Sharepoint (Expensive) or the cloud. (Trust issues) Or office 365 wich is expensive, and no one really trusts...
But this is a viable FOSS option, on a trusted platform (Can't swing a cat without hitting an owncloud article) that can be public, or locked down internally.
Glad to see it's GPLv3+, and that they included statements in the javascript that gets sent to people's browsers.
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AbiWord and AbiCollab have been providing a free real-time document collaboration service in the cloud for 4 years.
See:
https://abicollab.net/
As a company that has government contracts forbidding us from storing data outside of canada, this library is very good news.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
1) Setting up Apache was cake because I can comprehend my mother tongue at the, you know, middle school level. But then I don't run Linux.
2) I drink less than Google, so I get security through sobriety. Well, almost sobriety.
I've been waiting for ODT editing to come to ownCloud for a while now so I could drop my last Google usage outside of search. I just wish there was a way to use it while turning off the collaborative stuff. Things seem to go wonky when you don't close a document properly sometimes.
I setup an older version at work to sync important files between laptops. Version wasn't that far behind. We had nothing but trouble with it. If clients didn't hit the network or Internet, sometimes the clients would just lose all their settings. And client setup was not trivial, so I had to be the one to do it. Also, it would sometimes create a huge number of dupe files, which were versioned in order to stop collisions.
All in all, we ditched it for Goodsync. Not perfect, but it doesn't just one day up and lose all its settings for no apparent reason or create hundreds and hundreds of dupe files.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
AbiCollab isn't browser-based is it? That'd be what makes this more like Google Docs than AbiCollab is.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/0032254/abicollab-takes-on-google-docs-and-zoho-writer
(Does anyone know what it'd to setup a private AbiCollab server? "AbiCollab (the feature of AbiWord) has a number of backends for you to use in collaboration. One is Jabber-based, one is TCP, and one is the "AbiCollab.net Service" - so you can run it either centrally hosted or peer-to-peer.")
Abiword has been doing collaborative editing since the previous century.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I think this is a real game changer. Up to now, if you want document colaberation you have Sharepoint (Expensive) or the cloud. (Trust issues)
At this point in time, it's not really a viable SharePoint or SkyDrive replacement. While being able to work simultaneously on ODF documents is a great addition, it's not going to provide any real competition to SharePoint until you can have authors simultaneously editing MS Word documents -- in MS Word. For many small business (especially with remote workers), this is "must have" functionality.
On the flip-side, I presume simultaneous authoring in Word is going to be extremely difficult to reverse engineer; and MS ain't gonna give up those protocol specs anytime soon.
Ok, go trust 'the cloud' then and play the odds.. People like you are the reason this corporate/government oligarchy gets away with what it does.
I just set it up on a spare server and had a quick play with an odt version of a NIH grant (US National Institutes of Health) I'm collaborating on at the moment. Not too shabby - unlike google docs it doesn't completely bork the page formatting and the collection of styles we use to keep it in line with the (typographically absurd) requirements of the NIH (oh, SF424, how I hate thee). Which is a big deal, because most of the sections required in an NIH grant have strict page limits (and required fonts, font sizes, line spacing, and margin limits), and getting right to those page limits without going over is important. So when you've finished collaborating and are ready to download the final document, with google docs a) you have to reimpose those margins, fonts, etc which is a pita; and more importantly b) you run the real risk that on reimposing those margins, fonts etc the page count will change, requiring another whole round of editing to get it under the required page count. Whereas this appears to keep the document in odt the entire time and hence there'd be no nasty surprises at the end.
Having said all that, there's no way to add citations. Google docs has a close to useless implementation of citations (imagine 5 scientists collaborating on a document, each of whom have their own citation databases with thousands or tens of thousands of entries, and then go and have a play with citations in google docs. Try not to giggle too much when you realize how well that'd go..). But given open/libreoffice has really good integration with zotero, and zotero is also open source and browser based, it seems like these two could be made to talk to one another, which for academic collaborators would be a HUGE feature, jumping it way ahead of any other collaborative tool I've ever seen. And believe me, collaborative writing is so central to my work that I play with *anything* that looks like it might be an improvement on google docs or the nightmare of emailing around multiple copies of a document with 'track changes' in heavy use.
There are a few design issues in Sharepoint which make me see it as not viable as well - eg. encapsulating files inside a database instead of keeping them as files with a reference too them is a very major one once you get above trivial file sizes and a trival number of versions of the files.
Once somebody starts putting files in the multi-GB scale into Sharepoint it hits that design wall, stalls or crashes, and something else is needed.
So it fills a niche Sharepoint doesn't and presumably vice versa if your users never work on huge files.
So IMHO it's far more viable than Sharepoint unless MS gets their act together.
Also Afresco offers web-based collaboration and edition of ODF documents. How it compares feature-wise I don't know.
Yea 'cause most people wanna mess with setting up Apache and some other Linux bullshit.
Why would you need to do that?
I just clicked the "Install" button for Owncloud in the Software Centre.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
There hasn't been new release of AbiWord in 4 years either...
Also OpenDocument support in AbiWord is nonexisting. Even Windows 8's WordPad supports OpenDocument better (for real. don't laugh. it's sad, not fun).
How is a free cloud service the same thing as being able to host your own?
AbiCollab certainly precedes by many years. WebODF is newer and has two advantages of AbiCollab.net.
First, WebODF runs just in a browser with no need to install it locally. It runs completely on a webpage. That's why it can by integrated into any web-based workflow. E.g. a user could generate a document by filling in a questionnaire and edit a document afterwards with WebODF.
Second, there is no document conversion. A document that is loaded into LibreOffice, AbiWord, OpenOffice, or Microsoft Office, edited and saved again, will be significantly different from the original document. Features may be lost or saved differently. Since WebODF just loads the ODF XML into the DOM and saves back the DOM, the document is unchanged, except for the places that have been edited. This is even true when the documents contains features, e.g. xforms, that are not supported yet.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
How well does this work on touchscreens like mobile phones and tablets?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
And so what, what has happened to Sun Open Office? Abandoned, rotting in Apache's abandonware collection. The alternative was complete bitrot so I applaud Apache for taking it on board, just for the sake of it.
Libreoffice, on the other hand, is getting a lot more submissions and features.
I was wondering why the last upgrade (Debian) on my server resulted (unhappily) in LibreOffice being installed.
Owncloud is very useful. I use it for file syncing, calendar, contacts, firefox (iceweasel) sync, etc. I've been using it for about 6 months, and, so far, it has been reliable.
Best wishes,
Bob
And so what, what has happened to Sun Open Office? Abandoned, rotting in Apache's abandonware collection.
Evidently not, the latest release was on Oct. 1st, 2013. By now three of the four users have probably downloaded and installed it.
I just clicked the "Install" button for Owncloud in the Software Centre.
Linux bullshit
Yah, and also having choice sucks. I know and it's also bullshit that there was the option to compile from source or "apt-get install $package". I had to wait almost 30 seconds. When I went to use it, I had to set up a password!!!! Does Droppants ask you to set up an account too?? 'Cause if I can get around having this stupid password incovenience, then I'll drop ownCloud like a bad habit. However the linux bullshit is pretty convenient and I'll keep using that.
If you just forgot to use your sarc tags, that's cool bro. If you were being serious, then get a clue
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
3) Now keep quiet and let me throw chairs at you.
like who originated the odf format? hint, submitter and editor.. it was not libreoffice.
still need some help? figured you might. try sun microsystems (pre-oracle days) and openoffice.org (pre-dating the hissyfit that spawned the libreoffice fork). it was their specification that was used as the basis for odf standard.
Seems you're too young to have heard of StarDivision:
StarWriter 1.0 was written by Marco Borries in 1985 for the Zilog Z80. Borries formed StarDivision in Lüneburg the following year.
Sun acquired StarDivision in 1999.
I think GP wants to use Owncloud as Dropbox replacement, just redirecting a dropbox client to his owncloud via hosts file or something like that so that he could continue to use the dropbox client he's already using.
Assumptions and speculation of course.
I've been using it on https://owndrive.com and i must say it's much better than Dropbox. Also good to know that it's away from all the US governance. Just asked their support about version 6 and Documents and it's coming right over the new year. Looking forward to it.
Meier.
You got that 100% correct.
Oh. Why? ownCloud has it's own windows client. If the problem is he's to lazy to spend less than 1 minute downloading the ownCloud client, double clicking, pressing next then typing in his credentials then he's probably not going to invest the effort in setting up the server.
Good for you. Now try to support files larger than 4Gigs in size, take notes and please share online how you did it. There's plenty of suggestions but none that actually worked. It's clearly feasible (ref. Mega.nz) but what a hassle.
I still use Owncloud as a personal music server with no config changes, but we had to reject it as a business solution (Google won) because of the the "messing up with all kinds of Appache, Linux, database, file system and other configuration files". We have other things to do like serving customers.
Dude, I'm too lazy to talk to all the friggin' developers of every second app for my tablet and phone out there that want to be lazy and use those easy dropbox API libs instead of going the extra mile and letting me use my own infrastructure (with equally easy to use libs).
I've invested a *lot* of effort in my servers and they are expecting everyone to drop the ball and go to dropbox, just 'cause the world decided it wants to appify all of it and put all my data "in the cloud."
I am lazy. In fact, I'm so lazy, that I will probably write a data-mapper to translate all those calls into some standard protocol myself if I don't see a (semi-)open re-implementation of the dropbox API soon, because that's going to be more maintainable than writing a bunch of shell-scripts or maintaining rsync configs for my rooted and/or jailbroken devices for every app that I want the data to be synced with my servers. If I do, I'll be sure to put a prominent enough note on the project page for you to remember this post. In fact, I might even include your name in the README.
Windows? Don't make me laugh! Who still uses Windows these days?! You can stop trolling now and get off my lawn!
That's a limitation of the 32 bit version of PHP. I use the 64 bit version, so I don't have that problem.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Seems you're too young to have heard of StarDivision:
StarWriter 1.0 was written by Marco Borries in 1985 for the Zilog Z80. Borries formed StarDivision in Lüneburg the following year.
Sun acquired StarDivision in 1999.
Seems you're too young to remember that StarOffice didn't use OpenDocument; it used a binary format. It was only after Sun rebranded the suite from StarOffice to OpenOffice that OpenDocument was released. Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, the first OpenDocument release was in 2005, 6 years after the acquisition of Star Division by Sun. That sounds about right to me, as I was using the suite at the time, so I have no reason to doubt Wikipedia's information.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......