The chronicles of ONLYOFFICE: Year 1

Can you believe that ONLYOFFICE project will turn 10 this year? To celebrate this anniversary, we would like to invite you to an exciting journey through our memories. In today’s blog post, we will tell you how it all began in 2010. Ready to get nostalgic?

Project launch. Back then, we took a decision to switch from making multimedia apps to developing office applications. And it all started with the platform for internal collaboration. We launched the project called TeamLab.

The first module we used and tested ourselves was Community with blogs, forums, bookmarks, and even an app for ordering food. After a while, we introduced TeamLab to a wider audience and added Projects and Talk modules.

Open source code became public. The source code of our solution became available on SourceForge (actually, it’s still our repository).

The work on localization started. We understood how important it was to translate the interface so that as many people as possible could use our software in their native language. Among the first added interface languages were Spanish, German, French, and Russian. TeamLab website also became multilingual.

TeamLab AMI went live. We launched our first Amazon Machine Image.

Data restore utility introduced. We released data restore utility that was available for TeamLab AMI and open-source versions. It allowed restoring the previously backed up data in one click.

Useful features added. That year we added time tracking, project tags, drag & drop sorting for tasks and some other features to the project management module. Curious to see how did the old interface look like? Here it is!

As for other general enhancements, we added custom portal URL, web-mail contacts import, editable user avatars, ‘What’s new’ aggregation page, inserting YouTube videos in blogs, forums, news, and project discussions.

(We can’t get rid of the idea that it’s the actress Teresa Palmer on the avatar. We wonder, did someone from our team admire her at that time?)

Since the very beginning, we were very attentive to our users and wanted to make their experience as comfortable as possible. We started to compose useful documentation, and a step-by-step guide for TeamLab open source deployment was among our first tutorials.

User feedback is always very appreciated for us. We started to publish your success stories back then and continue to do it now. Read, for example, this interview dated 2010 with Erik van der Zijden, co-founder of Dutch company DigiRedo.

At the end of 2010, we published a blog post telling about our plans to release a separate Documents module for storing, sharing and co-authoring docs. But the most interesting thing about it was the virtualization technology that allowed users to run the text editing application online with no need to install it on their PC. It was our own development made by Virtual11, another project launched by our company at that time.

Would you like to discover even more amazing facts about ONLYOFFICE history? Stay tuned! A new blog post with our chronicles will go live every week.

Do you have any interesting details in mind connected with your ONLYOFFICE experience? Share your stories in comments below, or tweet us at @only_office.