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.

Comments

Re:Dropbox drop-in replacement?

[Bradmont]

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).

More than that...

[houstonbofh]

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.

Not the first:AbiCollab has been running for years

[msevior]

AbiWord and AbiCollab have been providing a free real-time document collaboration service in the cloud for 4 years.

See:

https://abicollab.net/

Re:Dropbox drop-in replacement?

[MightyMartian]

As a company that has government contracts forbidding us from storing data outside of canada, this library is very good news.

Re:Good idea. What's the server side like?

[Phil Urich]

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.