ONLYOFFICE Connectors
Collaborate from where you store
Before, you had document editors that helped you create texts, spreadsheets and presentations and then save them on your computer’s hard drive. Then came online editors and cloud storage services: everything moved to the browser and you could put any document in the cloud to keep it safe and share it instantly with anyone you need.
Now you have editors, clouds, and apps that bring those together. You don’t leave one single interface anymore. Jump right into your private document list and start writing your daily report at no cost of precious time. In total, just a couple of server setups, a connector app, and a little bit of IT knowledge are needed.
Several developers are offering their online suites for integration today: Microsoft, LibreOffice, Zoho, and us, ONLYOFFICE. Our article is obviously about the latter.
What is in integrating document editors?
Say, you deal with a cloud platform, for instance, Nextcloud or SharePoint, to keep and manage your everyday work documents. You spend approximately two minutes on moving one document to your Nextcloud folder since it was created elsewhere. With 10 documents a day, that makes up to two hours a week, or eight a month. Time to give yourself a day off!
Notably, integration would change a lot for those up to everyday collaboration on documents. You spend unaffordable parts of you work days to drag documents here and there when it requires real-time editing in a suite and a well-managed storage in some cloud. There are all-in-ones, but that’s your decision whether or not to trust security of the well-known big players that are targets number one for every hacker or authority.
Wait, what is a connector?
Integration applications, or connectors, are used for integrating one service with another. In our case these are ONLYOFFICE Online Editors and various cloud storage services: Nextcloud, ownCloud, SharePoint, Alfresco and Confluence (at the time when this article was written).
When the app is installed and the settings are all set up, you can notice that a new menu has appeared just where your file list nests. This button launches the ONLYOFFICE Editor in the interface of your platform, where you can open, create documents, edit and save them back, collaborate with other users.
Which platforms can I integrate ONLYOFFICE in?
Let’s have a quick tour around:
SharePoint. A cloud-based document storage and management system developed by Microsoft. Reportedly, it has 190 million users in 200,000 organizations worldwide. The functionality is highly extendable with various service integrations
ownCloud is a data storage solution deployed on private server of a client. ownCloud is a free open source software. Primarily serving as a file management and storage system, ownCloud is extendable with variety of services including editing suites, calendars and more.
Nextcloud is a rapidly developing fork of ownCloud.Technically both show completely similar features, however Nextcloud supports integration with conferencing services for audio and video chatting.
Confluence. It’s a collaborative platform delivered either as on-premise or SaaS solution. In Confluence, project management tools are mainly emphasized, while they are strongly supported by document management and communication features.
Alfresco is an enterprise content management and data storage system. Besides document management as a core spectrum of tools, Alfresco offers web content operations such as publishing.
What features do I get when I have ONLYOFFICE integration app set up?
ONLYOFFICE handles text documents, spreadsheets and presentations allowing to invite other users to edit them collaboratively. Having Microsoft OOXML formats as a core, it supports DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, TXT, RTF, ODT, ODP, ODS and CSV for editing, and works with PDF, RTF, HTML and HTM (opening, downloading). EPUB, XPS and DjVu can be also viewed with the text editor.
Editors support complex formatting for both reading and editing. Operations with autoshapes, various diagrams, tables, formulas, template tools give it solid professional capabilities. Any large files with dense data amounts are proceeded without frictions, while the interface response is not affected by any inner performance limitations.
If I have a team and we work together on docs. What do I get?
Collaboration opportunities with ONLYOFFICE are broad. All three editors offer co-editing among users in real time: in text document editor the changes are viewed instantly, while in spreadsheet and presentation editors they become visible when the user finishes operation with a cell or an object, respectively.This was applicable to the default Fast editing mode, while the Strict mode allows editing privately within the selected piece of the document: other users can neither see changes nor edit that piece unless the mode is disabled by initiator.
Additionally, there are comments, live chat and revision tools given within the editors. Their usability depends on the exact collaboration needs. For instance, commenting is useful when one needs to leave instructions for users with whom the document is shared, while chat is rather a god tool for discussing non-editing questions related to the document. There is also a version history panel where changes and their authors can be tracked, as well as selectively restored.
What if I don’t even use any of these platforms ONLYOFFICE integrates with?
Well, there are plenty of other platforms that we haven’t yet developed integration apps for. We are currently researching the spread and usability of other services to find out integration with which would be the most demanded for today.
If you are a proud user of one of those and we succeeded to capture your attention with this material, the comments section is here just for you! We would really appreciate some details of what exactly makes your service useful, and how ONLYOFFICE would add to its functionality.
In exchange, we promise to add your suggestions to our to-do list and develop an app for you as soon as possible!
