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Collabora brings LibreOffice Online to ownCloud

What's a privacy-friendly and high quality replacement for Google Docs? Look into LibreOffice Online brought to you by Collabora and ownCloud. This blogpost explains what it is and how you can use it.

Collabora and ownCloud, Inc. just announced a partnership and released CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), a VM containing LibreOffice Online and ownCloud Server. This brings powerful viewing and editing capabilities for spreadsheets, presentations and text documents to the ownCloud web interface.

As a development preview, it is still work in progress but we welcome you to get it running, provide feedback and get involved. Read on to learn more!

LibreOffice Online and ownCloud

LibreOffice Online is what the name suggests – an online version of the well known LibreOffice suite of productivity apps: word processor Writer, spreadsheet Calc and presentation tool Impress.

“Collabora and LibreOffice Online” integrated in ownCloud Server brings these powerful productivity features to ownCloud users. They can work on their documents on the go from the browser or share a spreadsheet through a public link and have recipients edit directly in their browser.

No other cloud technology offers the quality of rendering LibreOffice brings to the browser and this development edition already offers a wide range of features, with more to come.

Features

The current online version of LibreOffice has a simplified user interface available through the ownCloud integration app. This is not inherent to the technology, work on expansion is ongoing and the team certainly welcomes any help in adding functionality. Already many more capabilities are available behind shortcuts.

 

More behind shortcuts

More behind shortcuts

 

The rendering used is identical to the desktop version, which means documents will look exactly the same in the web and offline version. Images, tables, graphs, word-art, styles and anything else embedded in the document will be there and will look exactly as it should.

This is unique to LibreOffice as other web based office suits have created new rendering engines which typically introduces subtle differences and missing features compared to their desktop counterparts and the standards they implement.

 

 

Learn more about Collabora Online Development Edition and grab your copy here.

Getting it

“Collabora and LibreOffice Online” requires LibreOffice Online to be installed on the server, so a fully functioning document viewer won’t be easily installable from the ownCloud app store.

For testing, Collabora has made available a Development Edition including ownCloud Server with LibreOffice Online integration on their website. It comes in the form of a virtual machine combining ownCloud Server and “Collabora and LibreOffice Online”. It is still very experimental but that’s its charm: you can get involved right away!

 

collabora Online DE running in a VM

Collabora Online DE running in a VM

 

You can get started on this page with build instructions for the online version of LibreOffice and you can find “Collabora and LibreOffice Online” in this repository.

Get involved and help make LibreOffice Online and ownCloud the perfect online collaboration tools!

EDIT: Here’s a link to the latest update about CODE.

ownCloud

December 15, 2015

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