Sure, sirā¦ firing marketing staff that provide such bad PR to the companyā¦
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Hello,
As a new nextcloud user I can say:
I am impressed by Nextcloud, and how the company behind it supports free software and still is able to earn money with services for big enterprises. Those are the ones who need support, SLAs etc.
What I read about Collabora is a huge disappointment. I did not know that it is legally possible to take free software like LibreOffice, use it for your own product, and then offer this product as more or less closed software demo product.
While Nextcloud makes it easy for home users and small businesses to install their software, Collabora tries everything to āscare users into contractsā, by calling their own source code unstable/not useable etc.
I never saw that at free software projects.
I had a look what Collabora has to sell:
Well, 17 EUR/year/user is not much, could afford that for my 4 users. But no way to book that. You have to ācontact salesā, and when you scroll down a bit you see what they really want to sell: Support contracts starting at 14k EUR / year - insane for any small business.
As I refuse to install their demo version there are mainly 2 options:
- stay with the VERY well working Google Sheets (4 EUR/user/month in GSuite)
- go back to non-collaborative editing - everyone edits offline with LibreOffice, tells others to not edit at the same time, then sync via Nextcloud, tell others to continue editingā¦
It is a pity, that there is no free software replacement for the whole GSuite yet. Hope that will come - as real free software - easy to use and install (like Nextcloud).
greetings,
Thomas
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Honestly, you can complain all you want, but in the end it is still fully open source and not freemium/open-core like many other such products.
And if you have just 4 users the easy to install CODE edition would work just fine. In the end you also have to realize that due to the way Collabora works, anything more that what the CODE edition allows needs a quite fast server.
That said, try OnlyOffice, which is IMHO the better online office suite right now anyways. Itās also fully open source and the build in limits of the supplied docker image are mostly technical, i.e. what you would expect a typical VPS can handle.
A question about Onlyoffice: Can I run it on the same server as Nextcloud? I looked at the website and it seems that they highly recommend that it runs on a different server - and having 2 machines running round the clock just to edit a hand full of documents from time to time seems a bit of an overkill.
And where is the data/document stored in Onlyoffice? Is there a ārealā document on the harddrive which can be backed up (and opened eg in Libreoffice later if needed), or are the documents stored in some strange format / database (like Google Sheets, where you see some .gsheets files which are just links to the cloud but no offline copies)?
Onlyoffice uploads the document if you open it within Nextcloud. It then saves changes back to the Nextcloud server if you edit it.
Honestly, if you have just 4 users then both Collabora CODE and Onlyoffice will do the job for you. You can even install them both so you can select the editor in Nextcloud you want to use. If you want it to do relatively easy then Docker containers for both might be the best option.
Regarding the format, advantage or disadvantage depending on your usual tools, but OnlyOffice uses MS .docx .xlsx etc. natively and not .odt like Collabora Libreoffice. And yes files are stored on Nextcloud plainly.
About a single serverā¦ live document editing is quite resource heavy, so having it on a separate machine can make sense. Especially for Collabora, as all the heavy work takes place on the server. OnlyOffice is somewhat better in that regard, but still.
That said, in theory it can work on a single server and there are some desciptions how to do it, but personally I never succeeded doing so. Their install script for a dedicated server works great though and through docker I am running it fine on the same (beefy) machine.
P.s.: onlyoffice also offers a hosted service for small offices for better prices than gsuite. But I never tried that and are not afiliated with them 
You can run both on the same server, but I recommend to have only one NC-app enabled, or you might have a bad time editing the documents.
This is based on the false assumption that license fees are the only working revenue model for companies building software. It is perfectly possible to live from services and support without imposing usage limitations and without introducing any license fees. A matter of defining a strategy and executing it well.
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This is true.
Those who are successful enough to live off developing software often forget that there are those of us who need open source software without the limitations of āsharewareā - because we literally cannot afford to pay for software, and can barely even afford what we already have.
Face it. This is a cruel world. Some of us are dirt poor. Weāre just trying to get by like everyone else. If we could pay thousands - we would. Yet, we get called freeloaders, and if we point out an issue, weāre labelled āentitled.ā
Sorry, but that kind of thing just rubs me the wrong way.
Service can be profitable - if done right. But any form of selfishness will always lose in the long run, even if it works for a mighty long time.
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Compile it by yourself if you do not want restrictions:
Last known good configuration 2018-12-26 also with debian-9 (stretch)
officeonline-install.cfg:
##########################
set_core_regex=ācp-5.3$ā
set_online_regex=ācollabora/collabora-online-3$ā
lo_src_branch=ādistro/collabora/cp-5.3ā
lo_src_tag=ācp-5.3-61ā
lool_src_tag=ā3.4.2-1ā
###########################
The question is: Is collaborative editing really necessary for every document?
In my small company we have maybe a hand full of documents which are edited collaborative (used by 2 or 3 people often). But most documents can be opened just locally in Libreoffice, and synced by nextcloud after saving the changes.
For that one server (NC and Collabora) is perfectly fine. In our case an old desktop computer with only 2 GB RAM (!) is enough. And today you get used computers with 32 GB of RAM for some 300 EUR.
What I find great is that Collabora and Libreoffice use the same format, and files can be either opened in the browser (Collabora) or on the Desktop (Libreoffice) and stay always synced and on the same place in the file system.
What I donāt understand is why Collabora (sheets) lacks so many features, when it is based on Libreoffice. Thats also a main reason why we use it only as simple editor or viewer for sheets, but for all other things better use the normal Libreoffice.
Where is the problem? Anyone who needs more can remove the restriction, without paying anything! Install Collabora Online from the sources and dont use the Docker version or other Versions from Nextcloud/Collabora.
The same do OnlyOffice.
Perhaps you want to look, when I opened this thread. To that time, this was not possible yet.
I think the limitation should be clearly stated on web page. I have created pull request just for that. See https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud.com/pull/1310
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