OnlyOffice on Nextcloud

Could we try OnlyOffice on the Nextcloud instance please @chris? I am not keen on Collabora when compared to Google Docs but have heard that OnlyOffice provides much more comparable functionality and ease of use.

Thanks in advance.

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Perhaps, when I have looked in the past I have been put off by their dual license policy (GNU AGPL plus a commercial one), but I guess if we ignore their website and get the code from GitHub then perhaps this isn’t an issue… but I’m not going to have much spare time to play with this for a few weeks.

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Did you ever manage to have a play @chris ? :slight_smile:

Would seem a good candidate for the type of thing that could funded by CoTech CoBudget were it up and running.

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After spending half a day working out that the latest Collabora Docker container only works on the last version of Docker CE, see:

And also finding out that that it now appears that you can edit LibreOffice files in OnlyOffice (previously you had to convert a .otd into a .docx before you could edit it and would therefore potentially end up with a different .odt and a .docx version of every file…):

It does give me more motivation to spend some time playing with OnlyOffice, but I’m still not sure when I’ll find the spare time for this…

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It’s not just onlyoffice that has to be able to edit odt docs… it also seems to require the onlyoffice nextcloud app to support it as well. In our experience, we can get onlyoffice to display the odt version, but you can’t edit it unless you convert it.

Despite that huge limitation, we made the switch at mf/pl simply because we couldn’t tolerate the limit on shared documents that comes with collabora. The whole saga is documented here: https://support.mayfirst.org/ticket/13671

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Hi @jamie, good to see you here :slight_smile:, thanks for the link, I’ll have a read through the Trac thread, it does seem like neither are ideal…

Nice to be here and see the forum. Btw, here’s a direct link to the most relevant piece of information about the use of odt file in nextcloud/only office: [FEATURE REQUEST] Add odt/ods extensions to open automatically · Issue #179 · ONLYOFFICE/onlyoffice-owncloud · GitHub. Sadly not resolved.

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I’m going to upgrade the CoTech Nextcloud server this afternoon (from Debian Stretch to Debian Buster) and uninstall the Collabora Docker container and install the ONLYOFFICE Community Document Server, in addition the, hardly used JavaScript XMPP Chat, won’t work with the latest version of Nextcloud, so I’ll disable it, however I won’t uninstall Prosody today, but perhaps we might as well since it hasn’t really been used?

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This update has been completed, I’d be interested to hear how how people get on with the ONLYOFFICE Community Document Server, this isn’t the Docker version as that was too annoying to get working, however I’m not sure what the difference is between them for users.

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Thank you so much, we just tried it with @Hannah and collaborative document editing (both ONLYOFFICE for .odt/doc and Nextcloud Text for .md) works brilliant!

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Yeah, I actually prefer Nextcloud Text over Etherpad, CodiMD etc. Way better on mobiles too.

Please not this comment regarding ONLYOFFICE:

To clarify, the “intended behaviour” is that documents are saved when the cron runs after all users close the document.

If your documents are not saving properly even some time after closing, please verify that your cron is functional (see skjnldsv’s comment above) and check your nextcloud log for any errors that might have been thrown during saving.

Edits and changes made in Onlyoffice are not synced into Nextcloud · Issue #100 · nextcloud/documentserver_community · GitHub

I’ll enable “webcron” for the site.

A couple of days ago I switched the CoTech Nextcloud server from using the ONLYOFFICE Community Document Server to use an external ONLYOFFICE document server which was provisioned using this ONLYOFFICE Ansible role and there is a demo repo here which builds both Nextcloud and ONLYOFFICE servers for testing.

If people can have a play with the browser based WYSIWYG editor and let me know how you get on I’d be interested to know how well it works.

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