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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.
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
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.
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/
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.
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.
Collaboration software has existed for years and Google/Microsoft are EXPERTS in this, both in terms of functionality provided in their respective products as well as commercial support. Given the fact this is designed specifically for ODF, a format no-one uses (at least no-one who cares about collaborating with others who don't have a chip on their shoulder), no-one is going to use this.
Owncloud should have spent more effort on improving their existing cloud software so that it doesn't fail to update files silently and other random bugs that compared to something like Dropbox, don't particularly instill confidence.
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.
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
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.
I have been using OwnDrive happily last 6 months and it's been a wonderful experience. I've switched completely from Dropbox to OwnDrive and now waiting for realtime colloboration coming with version 6.