OnlyOffice Community Edition without 20 connections limitation

🍱 Features & apps community document server
#100

Exactly my point. It is a separate app, not bundled with “Nextcloud Hub”
From the marketing guff at the top of every page here:

Installing a separate app is NOT built in Only Office.
The OO connector app has been available for some time (certainly in NC17 and possibly longer) - nothing has changed here.
Actually that is not quite true - when you install NC18 fresh then it gives you an option to install the connector app along with calendar, deck etc at the end of the install.

But you still have to do a completely separate install of OO in order for the connector to work. (or sign up to use OO demo version on their server for 30 days free). This is very far from “Built in ONLYOFFICE”. To me the marketing guff reads as if when I install NC18 it will also automatically provide full OO if I want it.

We have something called the Trades Description Act in this country which protects consumers against misleading marketing claims. I’m not going to report NC to Trading Standards, but NC should take down the misleading claims, which are at the very least pissing people off and damaging their reputation.

#101

hey @rogerco

as much as i appreciate every comment here (and so do i with yours, as well) i think this is now getting a bit silly.
apparently for you it’s all about the definition of the word “built-in”…
so what MEANS built-in?
is it part of the native code?
or is it enough if you can click somewhere on your screen to have it within a moment?
or does it only mean: hey, you can have (and use) it if you want it (but maybe you’d have a bit of work ahead of using it but then it’s just a click away)?

AAAAAAND… tadaaaa… the community edition comes free of cost. so if you’re gonna sue them what do you expect getting back? you have no financial loss of it. you even can’t argue that someone forced you to use a software that you didn’t want to use.

so why not cooling down a bit instead of getting angry about such a nothing?

btw: for me “built-in” means: i could have pretty fast and easy it if i wanted it. but if i don’t want i don’t need to take it. and thus i’m pretty happy that it won’t take away a part of my small amount of storage if i don’t install it.

cheerio
jimmy

2 Likes
#102

It is different. You click install and it self-configures without you having to set anything up. It also runs on Nextcloud instead of on another server or container. How much more built-in do you want it to be? You would rather the app be pre-installed for everyone even if they don’t want or use it? That would be a poor decision.

#103

Yes I agree, and I’m not angry and I wasn’t going to reply although I do take a somewhat different view to you - but I got pinged twice. I will try and make this my last on the topic.

I have tried both a clean install of NC18 and an upgrade from 17. In 17->18 the connector app remains the same (assuming you had updated it to the latest version). On NC18 you simply get the option to install the exact same connector app as part of the install - together with deck, calendar etc. (from memory you don’t get the option to pick one app and not the others which is a pain if you don’t want bloat that you wont use - but I might be wrong about that).

I was not aware of it doing any self configuration on the clean install that it didn’t do when I installed it on NC17. I still had to tell it where the OO server was and set up which groups could use it (shame it doesn’t have a mind reading facility to know what I want :wink:)

You still have to install OO separately - which is very far from claiming that OO is bundled with NC.

Absolutely right it would be. If the claim is that OO is part of NC then I would expect the option to install both the connector app and OO from within the install and/or from the Apps admin screen.

Clearly this is not feasible once you know what is involved, so for me the claim that OO is bundled with NC is spurious.

As @JimmyKater says it is not a big deal. Just an annoying misleading marketing claim by some possibly illiterate junior who doesn’t know what “built in” means.

The good news is that despite this digression and the previous long digression into the morality of modifying open source software, the OP has been well answered - we have not one but two solutions :smiley: :champagne: :stadium:
:rainbow: :sparkler: :fireworks: :medal_sports: :trophy:

3 Likes
#104

When you install the document server app, it configured the connector app for you if the connector isn’t already configured to connect to another document server.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at here because going to the apps admin screen and installing both of them is literally exactly what you do. It “comes with” NC just like NC “comes with” contacts and calendars, etc.

And I disagree that it should be pre-installed. If I set up a NC instance specifically for vendors to submit bids (which I have done several times) then coming with an office suite it doesn’t need is just wasted resources.

1 Like
#105

Hey i work at a coop too. Specifically an IT one and we use next cloud too.
So, we may be of help. Here is our mail if you want to contact us even beyond this issue in particular, we are looking to work with other coops.

info@camba.coop

1 Like
#106

So it is entirely possible to remove the 20 connections limit in the Community Document Server (CDS).

However there seems to be a bit of a ‘gotcha’. This is my, probably incomplete, understanding of what I have observed so please do comment if you have better knowledge or experience or can see a way around it.

CDS installs as a Nextcloud (NC) app using the same OnlyOffice (OO) Connector app as full OO but with the server entry pointing to the app instead of the OO separate server.

This means that CDS is using the same resources and database as NC

The problem is that the OO engine (used by CDS) works by writing every keystroke made while editing to the database (oc_documentserver_changes in the case of CDS). Periodically the changes get written back to the file and flushed from the db.

This means that if you have 20 users all typing away there can be a massive load on the MySQL server and this may slow down everything else in NC.

With full OO you are running it as a separate process using a separate database which should mean it works slightly better even if it is on the same host. And this probably explains why they recommend installing OO on a completely separate machine.

SO although you can increase the users easily in CDS, you might not want to.

Anyone else seen this effect.

2 Likes
Integrated OnlyOffice v. Standalone
#107

then wondering why nextcloud fork from owncloud ?!
and you know it’s possible to bay for support or using saas .

1 Like
#108

A post was split to a new topic: Proprietary Enterprise version

#109

look like need another fork :rofl::joy:

1 Like
#110

Sorry, folks, but what a tiring discussion this is.

We developed this integration for home users. That is why we started a private cloud project back in 2010, and that is our motivation until today. We want to help people protect their privacy.

Companies are not people. They have no right to privacy. And the only reason we care about companies is because they pay us to make Nextcloud better.

We didn’t spend a year working on this feature with companies in mind. Seriously. This is a gift of Nextcloud GmbH to hundreds of thousands of home users. When our customers want ONLYOFFICE they get it from us and that’s a packaged version that scales well and works great for large numbers of users.

Now yes, some companies use Nextcloud without a subscription. That is fine, the license allows you to do anything with it. That is open source. But please don’t complain when it isn’t good enough for one reason or another. Customers pay for the right to complain, and we listen to home users who complain because we care about people. Not companies.

6 Likes
#111

I’m not a company. I use NC for my own/family use and also for a volunteer community group.

Initially I thought that perhaps the community document server (CDS) might work well for the volunteer group who want collaborative simultaneous editing of documents, perhaps with more than 20 users sometimes. But having looked into it I now see that CDS will probably not scale beyond less than 20 users because of the way it is sharing resources with NC itself - especially database saving of keystrokes and server load.

That is fair enough for the situation @jospoortvliet describes - it is not designed or intended to work for large (or medium) scale use whether commercial or operating in the non-money economy.

I do still feel misled by NC’s marketing of the “bundled” product, but that is water under the bridge and just a bee in my bonnet.

Where I do still have an issue is with the failure to close sessions and write changes back to the file reliably. It is very very frustrating that a bug in either CDS or Versions (both of which are now part of core NC so there can be no blame game between them) is causing us to loose data.

It is beyond my skill level or understanding of how the only office core or versioning work to establish where the fault lies - but there certainly is a bug there - I have empty files to prove it!

I guess you don’t mean large numbers of users on the same nextcloud instance do you :wink:
It also can’t be said to scale well if it tops out at less than 20 users. (testing today we had over 5x server load on an 8core big ram server with no other activity going on and 7 users with a total of about 30 docs open - it was getting seriously slow opening docs and also unresponsive for other uses like simply opening folders - sometimes over a minute for a 2 page docx to load)

1 Like
#112

I have a client where 5 users use a shared .xlsx file on the Docker Version of OnlyOffice/DocumentServer
And everyweek you have loss of modifications that one user made.
It’s strange because you can’t quit the page without a warning if the document isn’t saved.
I have nothing in versioning testifying that this user made some modifications…

It’s really odd.

NC and docker OnlyOffice are on a Xeon proc with 24GB ECC DDR4 of ram and RAID 6 of 4TB

#113

I would personally use worse words than ‘odd’, I mean, that should totally work and never lose any data… That’s a serious bug. If you can figure out what causes it, I would hope that ONLYOFFICE engineers would address it quickly… Any errors in the log?

1 Like
#114

Not at all, it’s like the session never existed.

Finally they stopped using OnlyOffice for collaboration on this particular document. I made an AFP local share that locks the file when somebody open it. It’s a step back but now it works.
Beside i rather prefer to see this Online Office work for them.
Maybe the issue could be the webserver that works on Nginx.
But no logs at all i can find.

#116

Although I’m interested in solving his problems, that’s not really the issue here. Can you start another thread of conversation?

#117

Good point. WRT this conversation, I’d consider OnlyOffice Community Edition without 20 connections limitation to be the final word here, sorry - it isn’t ideal that this doesn’t work well for more than a dozen users, but it wasn’t designed to. Use the docker container for that, perhaps one without the 20 connections limit if you prefer.

#118

Its a bug that many people have reported and happens because under some circumstances an editing session (whether using OnlyOffice or Community Document Server) is not cleared from the database. The document server (either of them) only writes changes back to the file when all sessions are cleared, so if one is held open (for reasons unclear) then it will not write changes back to the file.

Although the changes are recorded in one of the other document server tables that records keystrokes - so in principle you should be able to recover the changes by simply deleting the session(s) from the table and letting the document server write the changes back to the file.

It is very very bad bug and is the reason we have had to abandon shared editing which is a great shame.

3 Likes
#119

@rogerco using the search might help to find the right topic.

#120

For information, I find my solution in this thread : OnlyOffice compiled with Mobile Edit Back

Thanks again @Nemskiller !