ONLYOFFICE at online Nextcloud Conference 2020: how it was

This year, our technical partner Nextcloud gathered the community of developers, enthusiasts and project partners to share experience, discuss and report on what’s new in the Nextcloud world, and ONLYOFFICE happily joined the happening.

On 3rd and 4th October, took place the annual meeting of Nextcloud community: Nextcloud Conference. The pandemic didn’t seem to be an obstacle to this annual tradition, especially when the community is deeply rooted in online collaboration.

Overview

The Conference was hosted in Nextcloud Talk, a Nextcloud’s native live communication tool mainly designed for calls and chatting that did just well for the event of such scale.

The program included keynotes, talks, workshops, live interviews and even informal online after-hours. The main part is followed by traditional Hackweek which is also happening online.

This year’s agenda was unsurprisingly #HomeOffice, and our team had plenty to contribute to it, via a lightning talk and a workshop.

You can watch the whole Nextcloud Conference back on Nextcloud YouTube channel.

Lightning talk

Galina Goduhina, Head Of Sales at ONLYOFFICE, spoke in the partner lightning talk, where she gave an update about what’s new in the editors, setting up the office for federated clouds, Nextcloud sidebar support and more new and improved features in integration.

The talk is available on our YouTube channel:

Workshop

Alex Mikheev, our Head Of Professional Services, hosted a workshop explaining how to integrate ONLYOFFICE in Nextcloud to get seamless online office experience and avoid common issues:

• difference between ONLYOFFICE Document Server and Community Document Server;
• issues you might face during the integration;
• a classic way of using ONLYOFFICE within Nextcloud;
• the coolest achievements in ONLYOFFICE-Nextcloud integration and how to use them.

The workshop is available in a recorded live stream.

Questions and answers

After our workshop, we received a generous feedback, especially the positive remarks about the version history and force saving. There also was flow of good questions that helped us better understand the expectations and solve some troubles of our users. Here are the most common inquiries and our answers to them:

Q: Would really like the internal link feature from the notes app, also for ONLYOFFICE files so you could link from one document to another.
A: The external document connection functionality is currently being researched and planned for future releases.

Q: One problem: it doesn’t work on mobile for those who choose not to pay for a license.
A: Unfortunately, we had to make this hard decision when releasing version 5.5 of the editors. However, our applications for Android and iOS connectable to Nextcloud are free of charge and available to everyone. Read about the mobile web editors and mobile apps, where they are available and why, in our recent article on Medium.

Q: Is the sidebar feature already available?
A: Working with Nextcloud sidebar in ONLYOFFICE is supported starting from version 4.1 of the integration app.

Q: Is the community version free to use without any user limit?
A: There is no user limit in the community version of ONLYOFFICE, but the number of simultaneous connections (number of tabs with documents edited online) is limited by 20. The 21st tab will be opened for view only.

Q: Is there any encryption?
A: End-to-end encryption of documents is supported with ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors. Soon, we are releasing a major update that includes a new scheme for more advanced document encryption.