Digital transformation in higher education: how Jambi University implemented ONLYOFFICE Docs

Jambi University in Indonesia integrated ONLYOFFICE Docs into their own Paperless Office Application to easily work with documents online. Mohamad Ilhami, a university representative and tech expert, talks about their experience.

About UNJA

Jambi University (UNJA) is a state university located in the Jambi Province of Indonesia with around 27.000 active students, 13 faculties and more than 80 study programs.

With the mission of digital transformation, innovative research and affordable higher education, the university is developing the UNJA SMART platform.

You can take a panoramic tour across the university here.

A way to ONLYOFFICE

As Mohamad recalls, they were looking for a suitable application to edit and collaborate on documents online.

The first suggested option was Google Docs. However, after some search across the web, they discovered ONLYOFFICE and found its features much more appealing. And for now, they would highly recommend ONLYOFFICE to other educational institutions.

Compared to Google Docs, ONLYOFFICE is more feature-rich. Compared to Microsoft 365 Online, the API is much simpler.

Most needed features

According to Mohamad, they work mostly with DOCX files and the process of document creation in their team requires repeated editing sessions and co-authoring. When a document is finished, it needs to be converted to PDF for further distribution.

With ONLYOFFICE, the team can seamlessly take all the needed actions, marking the following features as the most useful ones:

The provided toolset is almost similar to Microsoft Office. Online storage, editing and collaboration, as well as conversion to PDF is the combination we need.

Integration: how it works

Jambi University maintains their own Paperless Office Application hosted at their sub domain which is used for managing letter distribution.

To integrate ONLYOFFICE Docs into this application, Mohamad used ONLYOFFICE API and found it well documented, with all the features they needed.

When users create a document, they are redirected to ONLYOFFICE Docs. When the editing session is finished, the callback function sends a notification to the application. Paperless Office then downloads the ready document and converts it to PDF format.

The application is being constantly improved, for example, to support digital signatures.