5 important things we accomplished at PowerFolder Congress

Our team has just returned from Düsseldorf where we participated in PowerFolder Congress. This annual meeting with our partners and customers is really important for us, and here, in this post, we want to share the results of this exciting event with you.

Here’s five important things we accomplished during the Congress.

This year of our partnership with PowerFolder was both productive and satisfying. We celebrated the first ten large customers – largest German universities, research centers, IT companies and public sector entities that use PowerFolder private cloud together with ONLYOFFICE online editors.

It was a pleasure to meet our clients personally, and it was even bigger pleasure to hear the words of appreciation for developing the things they asked for last year:
 

• Force save;
• Showing comments in the View mode;
• Cluster version.

Last year many of our clients showed a genuine interest in enrolling the cluster version* of our software. Some of them are now in the process of configuration it and getting ready for the production stage.

*Cluster version allows to deploy the solution at an unlimited number of locations or multi-server locations. It provides a more powerful software architecture, high availability and extra security. Learn more here.

We’ve created a special test portal for the Congress participants to experiment with the latest version of our editors that was previously available only in the cloud.

In version 5.0 ONLYOFFICE Online Editors were transferred to a brand new interface. The new layout groups editing instruments into functional tabs to make the work with our editors more intuitive.

The novelty received a warm welcome from our clients. According to their reviews, it is more convenient as some features, such as plugins, that previously remained unseen now took their rightful place.

If you want to learn more about the new version of ONLYOFFICE editors, read our blog or watch this video:

Plugins allow developers to add specific functions to the editors using our API. Last year we showed plugins written by our developers as an example of interacting with the editors (e.g. Chess, YouTube). This year we introduced real user cases – plugins which were written again by our developers, but on other developers demand. For instance, the plugin that enables you to insert one document into another. Why do you need such a feature? Let’s have a look at a real user case:
 

1. Several departments are working on reports for CEO. All the reports are saved in different documents.
2. They insert all of the reports in one document, which is unsurprisingly more comfortable for CEO to check.
3. When somebody changes the original report, the content of the document for CEO changes automatically.

Our clients reaction proved that adding support for plugins was a great idea and this is surely a direction to be moving in. Moreover, we got attacked with really exciting ideas about what functionality to add via plugins.

Dazzled by our plugins, the Congress participants suggested tons of excellent ideas, for example, to create a plugin that generates a link within the document to invite other users to edit it.

There were many suggestions concerning collaborative editing: add notifications about other users actions on different pages, for instance.

Another bright idea was to create a way to send reports about compatibility issues and other problems right from the document. At the moment you can send all the tricky documents to our developers using this email files@onlyoffice.com.

It was also really inspiring that our German partners see the future in adopting blockchain technologies for more security, just like us. So, just wait for more thrilling news about ONLYOFFICE!

The Congress is an annual meeting for the present and future PowerFolder customers and partners that allows them to discover new alliance opportunities. This year it was held on October, 11-12 in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Last year we answered some tricky questions during the conference. Discover the top 5 burning questions about the ONLYOFFICE Document Editors in our blog.

Known for its enterprise  ‘sync-and-share’ solutions, PowerFolder was the first to integrate ONLYOFFICE Online Editors into their products.

Recently, thanks to our partnership, we’ve brought powerful collaborative document editing to thousands of students and employees of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and other higher education institutions across the German state Baden-Württemberg. The integration details can be found in our blog post.