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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.
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).
It already supports Dropbox as external storage.
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.
The server-side is a fairly trivial install (especially because they provide repos for every major distro), mostly just depending on PHP. You can store data/config in MySQL, postgreSQL, or SQLite (the default, but obviously not recommended for multiple users). The files themselves have for some time been saved in per-user folders, with a separate folder for past versions of files (by default all files are versioned). For the Documents app, it seems to store a copy of each file named with a UUID/hash in the "documents" folder for each user, the filename that you see it as being merely kept in the database.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
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
SQLite (the default, but obviously not recommended for multiple users).
Obviously a good default for collaboration...
Abiword has been doing collaborative editing since the previous century.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
Also Afresco offers web-based collaboration and edition of ODF documents. How it compares feature-wise I don't know.
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.
Fixed in SharePoint 2010. In addition to storing the files within the database, they can be stored on the filesystem beside the database ("Filestream") storage, or elsewhere, including a SAN ("Remote Blob Storage").
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."
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.
The server side can be really simple. In a real-time collaboration scenario, there needs to be conflict resolution. The code for that is implemented in JavaScript as well and, in the case of ownCloud Documents, runs in the clients.
Each change to the document is sent as a numbered operation to the server. If a change with the same number has already arrived, the latest changes are sent back to the client. The client then modifies/rebases the original change on top of the new changes and send the change again.
The server stores each individual numbered change for the document as well as snapshots of the document for certain revisions. With some work, one could even store the change (audit trail) inside the document.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
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
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--;}
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.