It reads the document, then 'streams' the rendered document as image tiles to the browser client, which shows it to the user. Let's talk for a sec how they compare Collabora, as the two could not be more technically and non-technically different! Technical: how they workĪn embedded version of Libreoffice runs on the server.

Meanwhile, a new open source online office solution came around, ONLYOFFICE. So we had to keep maintaining the Documents app a little, as some users still could only use that. As you know, we care deeply about community/private home users and this was of course a great step forward.īut running docker, setting up a reverse proxy on a second domain with proper certificates - it isn't easy and does not work for everyone. We had worked with Collabora to make this available not just to enterprise customers, as before, but to all users thanks to the 'CODE' docker image. * Note that I use 'we' here loosely as I wasn't really involved back then, so think 'the core team', as a slowly-changing team of people, including Frank, Jan, Arthur and others.įast forward to our launch on J(happy birthday!), and a few months later we announced Collabora Online integration. Both of these did not really come true, and KO sadly didn't survive.

Also, we had hoped some customers would be willing to pay for it. We together put resources in integration and further development and we hoped other (open source) businesses would invest and contribute too, so the solution would grow in time. The Documents app was a from-the-ground-up developed ODF editor with a unique and very clever design, built by KO GmbH (now sadly defunct). Previously, we* had invested quite a bit in getting a collaborative document editor into our private cloud. With that out of the way, let's first look at how ONLYOFFICE got into Nextcloud.įrank, myself and others in the Nextcloud community have wanted to integrate office in our collaboration platform for most of the past decade. I'll try to cover both aspects, but there is always more. As always, relations and other reasons play a role. Let me first say - the decision wasn't pure technical.

Is one better than the other? Let's talk about this. Since the Nextcloud Hub release switched from ONLYOFFICE to Collabora Online as default, lots of people have asked why.

Nextcloud libreoffice