Office, suite, cloud. Sounds familiar. Google Docs. Yup. Microsoft Office 365. Yup. LibreOffice. No. Wait, what? Buzzwords around modern technology concepts are all too easy to ignore, but this one actually caught my attention beyond the almost-too-cliche dotIO domain, the blue design very reminiscent of Docker (hint), and optimistic text that promises wonders.
Anyhow, Open365 is an all-in-one productivity suite, based on KDE, Seafile, LibreOffice, Docker, and Jitsi. That’s enough buzz to keep you warm till 2020, but is it any good? Or rather, can it compete with the proven giants out there? I decided to explore and see what gives.
Cloud me upYou start by registering and then logging in. Quick and fussless, except you must specify the open365.io domain name after your username, e.g. john@open365.io. I would expect this restriction only to be somewhat valid if users with emails from other providers are allowed to utilize the services one day. Or perhaps the importance is in the fact the office suite also includes a mail client, which requires all the bits and pieces to function.
The browser-based interface looks very similar to other cloud-based office suites. You have a main view, which is a file manager of sorts. You can also download the client software for windows, Mac, linux, Android, and iOS. The software provides a very decent 20GB free storage, which should be more than enough for documents. But more on that soonish.
In the left pane, you have the option to share your libraries or folders, manage download links, manage your mobile devices, and such. Again, familiar, and slightly rough around the edges, but remember this is still a beta program.
From the main view, you can launch one of the five programs that comprise the Open365 suite. Impress, Writer and Calc are kind of expected. But then, as a bonus you get a mail client, nice, and GIMP, w00t. This makes the product quite lucrative for open-source users. The usage model is quite obvious, but if you struggle, the default My Library has a few documents you can open to see what gives and how the product behaves.
I fiddled about innocently for something likehalf an hour, trying to get the feel of the software, and it did what was expected. All in all, my initial findings were quite tame and optimistic. All the different programs were working fine, the colors were pretty, and I was in a good and healthy mood.
Let’s try something more stringent
Default documents are nice for showcasing stuff, and they sure work spotless. But what about some real-life examples? If you recall my articles on the Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, time andagain, the free suite failed. Not because it couldn’t do big things. Because it couldn’t do the fine details upon which professional work hinges. People who depend on 100% Office compatibility will probably NEVER be able to fully use alternative products. Still, for those who only need an occasional dabble in Word and Excel and alike, LibreOffice can be a suitable replacement.
I tested how well the program works by uploading several DOCX files from my Linux Problem Solving book , raw drafts that I wrote and provided to the publisher for review. The files contain custom style formatting, comments, notes, as well as tracking changes. They are also non-trivial in length and size.
Lo and behold, Open365 handled the challenge well. Remarkably well. No glitches, no bugs, no ugly formatting. Again, there’s no guarantee a tiny little issuewon’t show up somewhere and destroy everything, but if you need a free, cloud-based solution for your office, this seems to be a very decent option.
Tracking also works. Yippie!
GIMP is another interesting inclusion. And that means the 20 GB of data can easily be eaten with images. The mail client addition is also a nice touch. That one remains to be explored. In general, this means you get more than the desktop installation, as LibreOffice does not include the image processing software or the mail client. On the other hand, the full suite also includes half a dozen helper programs that are not present in Open365. And to be frank, you really don’t need them.
Last but not the least, humor! Nerdy all right, deserves 240 V, but still.
Sharing is Caring and security
The less glamorous but equally important side of online collaboration is actually having friends and sharing stuff with them. Open365 is no different from competitors and rivals in that it lets you create groups, set permissions, and share your stuff with other people. You can actually search for registered users, and this is somewhat similar to what Skype does. I am still not sure if this is a potential security issue or not.
Users are searchable, including their full email address. Needs to change.
You can also (try to) encrypt libraries alas, not with LibreOffice, which makes the choice of offering the option in the first place dubious. But you do have the ability to set a password for file uploads and downloads, which gives you some level of security. Cloud be cloud, right. This also smells familiar, so if you say S3, you are probably right, and the same applies toany online solution of this type.
History of your files, yes please. Version control, brothers and sisters, and that makes the available 20GB space even smaller, as your revisions will eat into that, however that does give you a nice ability to roll changes back, review old documents in their infant stages and such like.
Now, the problems (more, I mean) The most fundamental issue with Open365 is that it is not really portable as it claims. The download page has a Linux client only for Ubuntu 14.04 and above, and that means my initial Fedora attempt was not meant to be. I rebooted the laptop and launched the