ONLYOFFICE 2019: year in review

The year 2019 was highly productive for ONLYOFFICE. Here are the year highlights that prove this statement.

This year we had two major releases – versions 5.3 and 5.4 which brought many improvements like:

• Better work with images – applying shadows, flipping, rotating, cropping, aligning them to pages, margins, and slides (alignment and placement options apply to shapes too).
• More chart customization options. Change the look of all chart elements (such as the chart area, the plot area, data markers, titles in charts, gridlines, axes) by applying shape filling or changing line style.
• Headers/footers and print areas in all editors.
• Enhanced Document info in all the editors.
• Improved reviewing.
• Watermarks and adding formulas in tables in the document editor.
• New tabs Formula and Data in spreadsheets. And new formulas too!
• Spell-checking in spreadsheets.
• Text to Column and Paste Wizard, Group/Ungroup feature in spreadsheets.
• Chinese as a new interface language and improved support for CJK fonts with a completely renewed font engine.
• Saving in new formats – as MS Office Open XML templates (DOTX, XLTX and POTX), OpenDocument templates (OTT, OTS and OTP), and ISO-standardized version of PDF called PDF-A.

Besides, we made a snap package for our online editors which was highly requested, especially by those who are planning to use our editors together with Nextcloud (we’ll talk about it later on).

Get ONLYOFFICE online editors as snap

What is more, ONLYOFFICE Integration Edition is now available as AMI on AWS Marketplace.

The tabbed interface came to the open-source version! It reorganizes the editing tools into functional tabs. And with the interface new features came (which were previously available in commercial versions only):

• content controls, bookmarks, and track changes display modes in the document editor,
• pivot tables in spreadsheet editor,
• presenter view in presentation editor.

Learn more

We had two major releases – ONLYOFFICE 10.0 and ONLYOFFICE 10.5 which brought:

• More security options (2FA via an authenticator app, bearer authentication).
• New document access rights for commenting and filling forms.
• Mentions in comments that let tag other portal users for feedback.
• Document sharing at bookmark’s location with a special link.
• Better work with versions and revisions.
• Folders, filters, and templates in Mail.
• Enhanced projects with more intuitive buttons and actions, custom task statuses and removing projects in bulk.

These are the features available for the cloud service, Community Edition, and Enterprise Edition.

And some enhancements that are available only for Enterprise users:

• Easier navigation through ONLYOFFICE documents, emails, and other content with Elasticsearch engine.
• The new E2E encryption of documents.
• New features in Control Panel: renewed backup interface, Storage section to connect 3rd-party storages for your data, more activity tracking, secure email invitations.

We also brought new ways of installing self-hosted versions:

• One-click app on the DigitalOcean Marketplace. Learn more
• Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Learn more

Apart from adding the same features as in the online version, we were working on making our app available for more distributions (we love Linux, you know). So, last year our desktop editors got their snap and AppImage versions. This year we made the long-awaited flatpak!

Get ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors as flatpak

Oh, and now you can work with password-protected files created in MS Office. Learn more

ONLYOFFICE Documents app for iOS got a presentation editor this year. Moreover, it can now open ODF files for editing! And, starting from version 5.0, the app can be connected directly to 3rd party storages (like Nextcloud and ownCloud) to edit office docs stored there. Visit App Store

The Documents app for Android also got improved. You can collaborate on docs stored in ONLYOFFICE cloud, view/manage local files or connect the app to ownCloud/Nextcloud to view docs stored there. On-device editing as well as editing in ownCloud/Nextcloud are coming soon! Get it on Google Play

We also released ONLYOFFICE Projects app for iOS. Get it now

Apart from working with ownCloud/Nextcloud files using our mobile apps, we’ve significantly enhanced the integration with these technology partners of ours. Here are new features of our integration apps:

• Editors interface customization. You can adjust the header, switch on/off additional buttons, display or hide Chat menu, Feedback & Support menu, and Help menu buttons. Learn more
• Co-authoring between federated cloud instances.
• Watermarks, mail merge and connection to demo server for testing the editors without actually installing anything, and many other improvements.

Also, more sharing rights appeared in ownCloud:

• Download permission. Define whether or not people can save this file to their PC.
• Review permission. Users are able to suggest changes to the shared .docx file, as well as accept/reject them.
• Fill forms permission. Users can insert data into the chosen fields only (available for .docx files).
• Comment permission. Users can view and add comments to shared docs.
• Modify filter permission. It allows users to open a shared .xlsx file and configure the filters so that the changes will be displayed for every co-author.

Get connector for ownCloud or Nextcloud now!

We also significantly improved connector for Alfresco and added our own integration app to Liferay Marketplace.

This was a year of amazing new partnerships with:

• Seafile,
• eXo Platform,
• Jalios.

All the events are listed on this page, and in our blog, you can read our impressions about:

• Univention Summit and CS3
• Cloud Expo Europe 2019,
• Liferay Boot Camp 2019,
• Nextcloud Conference 2019 & Enterprise Day,
• ownCloud Conference 2019,
• it-sa 2019,
• Paris Open Source Summit.

Some of them:

• ONLYOFFICE and Google Docs: four main differences. Both us and Google have great online editors, but we have a very different approach to making them great. How different? You’ll learn from this article.
• Integrating ONLYOFFICE with a document management system. And by “document management system” we mean Nextcloud. Learn how integration is done and use this knowledge to your own good!
• Integrating ONLYOFFICE with a Python app. The article in which we are creating a simple DMS using Python, one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and integrate our editors with it (and also show how to implement co-editing and manage users).
• Setting up a private Google Drive alternative written on Golang. If making your own version of Google Drive sounds like a fun project, read on to learn about another integration case where the Sync&Share service is written in the Go language.
• Integrating ONLYOFFICE document editors with the groupware platform written on С#. An article on integration of ONLYOFFICE document editors with its own collaboration platform also known as Community Server.

Stay with ONLYOFFICE! The next year will be even more awesome.