Owncloud 6 Brings Collaborative Open Document Format Editing to the Web 73
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.
Re:Dropbox drop-in replacement? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).