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Open365 Is An Open Source Alternative to Microsoft Office 365 (open365.io)
Martin Brinkmann, writing for Ghacks: Open365 is an open source Office 365 alternative that allows you to edit or create documents online, and to sync files with the cloud. The service is in beta currently but you can sign up for it already on the official website. You may use it using a web browser, download clients for Windows, Mac or Linux desktop machines, or for Android. An iOS client is in the making currently and will be made available as well soon. Open 365 offers two main features that you can make use of. First, it enables you to synchronize files between devices you use and the cloud. Second, it allows you to view, edit and create documents in the cloud using the technology provided by the Open Source Office suite LibreOffice Online for that.
Modern app appers use APPS to app apps, NOT LUDDITE SOFTWARE like Open 365!
Apps!
NOT installing an Office Suite on your PC, which either came with Office Lite or whatever, or you're using a corporate PC which has Office?
Hint: Nobody creates spreadsheets on their phone.
I am not a cloud hater, there are some big advantages to the cloud. However for Office Tools I see no real benefit.
Our Computers are fast enough to handle them (even low end devices). Besides Office Tools should be available in an offline mode anyways.
Microsoft 360 offers no real benefit to the end user except for Microsoft so people keep paying for the service. Vs. Getting a copy and using it for as long as it will work on their systems.
If you want cloud for your office tool. use Google Drive.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If there's one thing that should be clear by now, it's that normal users and advanced users don't want to use web-based UIs! They always give an inferior experience to native apps, regardless of the platform.
Most of mobile's success is because of native apps, not because of web apps. And the native apps that have been implemented as wrappers around locally-running web apps have generally been disliked by users.
People don't use services like GMail or Google Docs or Office 365 or Dropbox or Facebook because of the web UIs. They use them in spite of the web UIs! They want the unlimited email storage, or the ease of sharing files, or the ease of sharing private/personal info with advertisers.
This is where the web technology advocates really strike out. Users don't use web apps because they want to; they use them because they want the back-end service, and there's often not a native client provided. When native clients are provided, we typically see users opting to use them instead of the shitty web front ends.
Seems like this is a closer equivalent to that than Office 365....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Office runs natively inside the browser, without the hassle to download custom software. Open365 requires a custom client to download.
My guess is they integrated libreoffice into NPAPI or PepperAPI and then ship the whole thing as the client together with a browser. That's not an 100% replacement of office 365 where you don't have to download custom blobs you have to fully trust. Office 365 is at least confined to the browser sandbox. And yes its all open source so at least you can audit it, but that doesn't help if there is a vulnerability in libreoffice and you get exploited. Office 365 uses the Web APIs and their sandboxing technology, which is very advanced and secure in comparison.
No Microsoft shill here, I'd love to see an OSS alternative to Office 365, but I hope that they set some priorities right.
Is it at least 99.9999% compatible with Office 365? Because if it isn't then it just won't be an option for many users, especially business users (which is where the big bucks are).
My NAS, and my safe in my house filled with LTO-3 tapes, completely under my control.
What am I missing??
I'm reading things like "no real benefit" but in terms of maintenance the benefit is HUGE. Yes we could all install libreoffice and dozens (or hundreds) of workstations but it's a PAIN to upgrade when new versions pass testing. This is much better from a computer/network administrator's point of view. I had been looking to in other solutions with a similar approach, but looks like it could be more straight forward. As for Office 360, do we REALLY want to be sending private data to MS. I prefer this. I already tell people to keep Windows 10 to keep their privacy, yet getting people off Google Docs was a bit of an effort. Possible this will help fix that.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Thin clients are back
But your browser is bloated
How does it fit?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Most companies I've seen going to Office 365 are primarily for Outlook with the bonus of removing the horror that is administering Exchange on-prem. Editing Word docs from a browser is a nice to have, albeit sometimes it relapses into a training issue, e.g. teaching mom where her document went.
The Free software foundation has written a recommended piece as to why you should avoid software as a service and that "open source" software as a service in no way protects users freedom or privacy. Online services should only be used when you want to share information with others. When you are working on data for your own use, their is no point in using software as a service, you give up rights when you do so.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html
I understood the main gain from this was to set up your own OC server and run it with that.
...it's running like a dog. I wonder if it's a good old fashioned slashdotting. Haven't seen one of them a round here for some time.
I have never seen "Software as a Service" used that many times in one post before. Do you get paid per usage?
Stallman is that you?
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Dear developers: Please ensure your site is functional in browsers other than Chrome.
I first noticed the odd animation on https://open365.io/ on Pale Moon, so I checked it in all the browsers I have installed.
Chrome shows it as it's intended (I assume)
Pale Moon shows the animation but it's not as smooth as in Chrome
Mozilla shows it as a herky jerky mess that eats up your CPU
IE (11, latest version on Windows 7) doesn't even render the background properly
I wouldn't dare to load it up in the pre-4.4 Android browser (Dolphin?).
What sold me on Office365 is that for the $99/year I get 5 terrabytes of cloud storage in OneDrive - 1 terabyte each for me and 4 others.
It's enough for me to keep all my photos over the decades, my 200GB music collection, and for the past five years I've been "taping" some internet radio stations 24/7 and keep them online too.
Very happy camper.
You can host this stuff yourself, on your own hardware and network, if that's what you prefer. -PCP
I do some tech work for a nonprofit. We're Office365, but there are a few documents better kept in-house. I've been looking for a self-hosted collaborative spreadsheet, preferably browser based, but nothing I've tried has materialized correctly...
FengOffice - doesn't support spreadsheets natively. The hackneyed workaround that does, only supports it in a particular, dated version of FengOffice, and after creating the document, the web app prompts to download the spreadsheet rather than edit it.
OnlyOffice - eight cores and 8GB of RAM for this VM, and it takes over a minute to load any document.
ZKSpreadsheet Server - From the hand of Johnny Ives himself comes the most beautiful spreadsheet software ever written. It's fast, it's easy to use, it's effective, it's simple to install, it's resource efficient...and it's $4,000.
So, if Open365 gets its self-hosted option off the ground, I would love nothing more than for this to solve my problem.
My experience has been that Libre Office has better compatibility with the dozens of MS Office versions than any version of MS Office does. In other words, if I want to edit a Word document created three years ago, I'll tend to get better results in Libre than in Office 365.
I have some documents created in MS Word about ten years ago, which is maybe four file formats ago. MS Office won't open them at all, Libre has no trouble with them.
until you stop paying for it, and all your files are lost to you.
There are some things that we do that we just don't care. The convenience is more important than other factors such as privacy and free software principles. I can give a personal example: I run paper and dice roleplaying games that I sync character sheets, images and other data to my players. I don't give a rat's ass who can scan them or if some service decides to go out of existence suddenly. None of the data is vital or in need of data security. If they disappear overnight, it's annoying but, I can just upload it on another service as I have backups. And if they really need to know the level of the paladin in my party... whatever.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Of course there is a point. The benefits of having location independence and "cloud" storage are the same whether the software is open source or not, or whether I share the information with others or not.
That would be the part where GP wrote that "[o]nline services should only be used when you want to share information with others."
People don't use services like GMail or Google Docs or Office 365 or Dropbox or Facebook because of the web UIs.
Just to be clear on this, Office 365 is the full standard aka "professional" suite of MS Office apps, including Outlook, locally resident, sold as a subscription service. The web component is there, but still secondary.
Online services should only be used when you want to share information with others.
Like collaborative documents when you don't want /can trust/pay google/microsoft ?
To give an example, I'm working on a story using Google Docs as my primary word processor. Yes, I could use LibreOffice - and if I had it as a local file that would be my preference - but Google Docs means I can edit it from my browser, leave the house, and then edit it more with my phone. If I'm waiting somewhere for a half hour, I can open my story and write a couple hundred words on my phone. If I get a great idea for a future story direction, I can make a note of it right in the document. If I want to read it to my son (he loves hearing the story I'm writing and reading it to him forces me to proof-read it), I can do this from anywhere as long as I have my phone with me. (I also use the commenting system in Google Docs to record where my son and I have read up to.)
If I had this as a local computer file, I wouldn't be able to add to my story as often and I wouldn't be as far into the story as I am now (32,000 words and counting). Yes, when it comes time to look into publishing it, I'll likely import it into LibreOffice for better formatting options, but Google Docs gives me an ease of use that locally installed programs don't.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The bottom of open365.io page has:
© eyeOS 2016.
What is the license than?
4wdloop
Web site still doesn't say how yet. It's mostly signup-walled.
The website you're referring to is just an example (and clearly an early beta stage one at that) of the relevant services being offered in a public access application service delivery model ("public cloud" or "SaaS" or even "PaaS" in today's silly terminology). You might want to inquire with Google about "LibreOffice online", or perhaps investigate something like this. HTH. -PCP
We use O365 at work and it sucks big green donkey dicks! Yeah I want to wait 30+ seconds to open a Microsoft document (word doc, excel, powerpoint). And it CONSTANYLY loses connectivity and you have to keep logging into it. What a POS!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Somebody needs to pay for these servers, so what's the business model? In those details is the likely answer as to whether or not this is a good idea.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
you'd be able to actually download the sources, and the prebuilt server packages.... but NOOOOOOO.. at least not on the this side of the registration wall.
I absolutely LOVE my Microsoft subscription-based access to my own (Copyrighted at their moment of creation) documents! I love it. I can never live without Microsoft Office Products!
Or maybe, perhaps I am suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
erm, because using an program err app err web app totally needs an account! And you need the account even before the app launched, because well .. just create it, okay?
Where is the source code? I know where to find source code for Seafile, LibreOnline, but for the open365 "bundle" :)
Or you could host a free software editing system somewhere trustworthy (that's not Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon.com, and others) and have the same minor conveniences without feeding a system built to destroy your family privacy.
There's nothing about your use case that justifies the need for this kind of hosting anyhow, as everything you describe doing could be done with hosting an ODF file on a file server you control. One hopes your family values privacy more than either convenience or bolstering the bottom line of known spy agencies such as Google.
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