Owncloud 6 Brings Collaborative Open Document Format Editing to the Web

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.

More than that...

[houstonbofh]

I think this is a real game changer. Up to now, if you want document colaberation you have Sharepoint (Expensive) or the cloud. (Trust issues) Or office 365 wich is expensive, and no one really trusts...

But this is a viable FOSS option, on a trusted platform (Can't swing a cat without hitting an owncloud article) that can be public, or locked down internally.

Re:I'd have been happy if it would just sync files

[dbIII]

A lot was fixed in 5 and it was easy to set up and use. The only hassle I've seen with the client software (which the users setup themselves without help), is sync issues of files vanishing on clients with clocks that are out by tens of minutes. The files are still available in the "previous versions" part of the web GUI but it's still very annoying behaviour.
The linux client in 5 also didn't handle links to different filesystems from the sync directory.

I have not used version 6 yet.

Re:Dropbox drop-in replacement?

[ozmanjusri]

Yea 'cause most people wanna mess with setting up Apache and some other Linux bullshit.

Why would you need to do that?

I just clicked the "Install" button for Owncloud in the Software Centre.