Most popular and interesting questions from online events answered

This January we took part in the coolest online events — CS3, Strategic Project & Portfolio Management for Pharma, Univention Summit, Online Workspace Summit, and G Cloud.

In this post, we gathered the most interesting questions their participants asked.

Security

Q: How do we secure mobile app authentication?
A: We secure it with 2FA and HTTPS for our apps. On iOS, you can also set an additional password and make use of LDAP and SSO.

Q: Why isn’t the File Sharing Platform used for encryption? e.g. in ownCloud Masterkey encryption is already possible.
A: We wanted to implement end-to-end encryption, so that nobody, except for the user who owns the data, can access it. Including the server admin.

Q: How is server performance affected by constant encryption in private rooms?
A: The encryption isn’t affecting the server performance anyhow. The file is being encrypted on the client-side and then sent to the server.

Q: Is it possible to prevent the documents from being downloaded locally, for example, or just allow them to be encrypted?
A: If you are integrating ONLYOFFICE Docs with your app, you can restrict downloading using our API.

Also, it possible to hide the download button when you are sharing documents via link in Nextcloud.

In ownCloud, you can allow or restrict downloading when sharing a doc for internal users.

We are also considering implementing a download restriction in ONLYOFFICE Workspace.

Please note that you will be able to download encrypted files from Private Room, but it will be impossible to open them.

Q: No user data is leaving the server.. what about document data ending in the users’ browser?
A: Using HTTPS protects the data exchange between client and server. If the server works correctly and the user installed no malicious browser extensions, the work is completely safe.

Comparing ONLYOFFICE with other solutions

Q: What makes ONLYOFFICE unique in comparison with other alternative solutions?
A: Our key points are:

• You can host ONLYOFFICE on your machine and fully control your data. Deploy on your server
• We provide maximum compatibility with Microsoft Office formats (docx, xlsx, pttx). You can check the comparison with other office suites on our website
• We offer a variety of collaboration tools within our editors, including two co-editing modes, commenting, reviewing, built-in chat. Watch video
• All the document editing and collaboration happen on the client-side, right in your browser. We put only a handful of processes there including saving, conversion, and spell checking. That greatly saves server resources and keeps work running faster. Learn how it works
• Developers can easily integrate our editors with web apps written in any language. Check API
• We have ready integration apps to use our editors within popular sync&share platforms. List of available integrations

Document editing and replacing Microsoft

Q: How do you think — replacing Microsoft Office by 2025 is realistic? Would you be ready to upgrade missing functions in spreadsheets and presentation software? Is there a functional roadmap?
A: Yes, replacing Microsoft Office by 2025 is a realistic plan. We are working hard on the missing functionality. You can track our roadmap on GitHub. At the moment, it contains information for the next version only, but we hope to broaden it in the future.

Q: Is OOXML or ODF the preferred format in the long term?
A: OOXML (docs, xlsx, pttx) it is. However, we will be constantly improving compatibility with ODF (odt, ods, odp) as well.

Q: How far are the forms on your roadmap?
A: They are this-year close.

Being open-source

Q: Is ONLYOFFICE completely open-source and is there an active community?
A: The source code of our project is available on GitHub, with 110 open repos. You can check the activity there, including open/closed issues, pull requests, etc.

We also have private repos with commercial builds.

As for the community, we have many active users who get in touch to report issues, give us feedback, and create PRs.

We also have many contributors that help us write/translate project documentation and represent us at industry conferences and events all over the globe.

Q: Which parts of ONLYOFFICE are open source? Can a scalable office environment be implemented as open-source software with ONLYOFFICE?
A: Here’s the list:

• The Community Edition of ONLYOFFICE Docs (our editors) and the desktop app are distributed under AGLv3.
• The collaboration platform ONLYOFFICE Groups with tools for managing docs, projects, contacts, and emails is licensed under Apache 2.0.
• The connectors (integration apps) we created for 3rd party sync&share platforms (Nextcloud, ownCloud, etc) are also distributed under Apache 2.0. Note that the connectors that we forked may be distributed with different licensing.

As for the scalable office environments — the Community Edition of ONLYOFFICE Docs has a limited number of simultaneous connections — 20. Clustering is available for commercial builds.

Other questions

Q: What are the tariffs for companies with less than 20 users?
A: Depends on what solution you want to use. Check out the pricing for cloud service and server-based solutions.

You can also use free ONLYOFFICE Workspace Community Edition if you have your own server and a qualified person in your team to administrate it.