@fasttech,
Judging from my previous experience of OnlyOffice when compared to Collabora Online is that OnlyOffice seams to be more resource hungry and may not be suitable for users that are running an environment within a limited VM or VPS host.
Also, for most professional typist and office workers / administrators, the on-line version can be used to complement actual LibreOffice installs (this is especially useful for those of us who may use multiple computers / devices and may be using devices that either have no office suite applications or may have devices that are restricted to MS office products ā Some of us do not like using newer versions of MS products and prefer to use LibreOffice or OpenOffice, as well as preferring to only using open-sourced based software, whilst trying not to use propriety applications).
Also, the recent release of LibreOffice version 6 does come with a tool to be able to upload / download files directly from WebDav shares. This feature allows for seamless integration between the desktop version of LibreOffice and the NextCloud / OwnCloud frameworks.
Interesting, I didnāt know about the desktop application integration, that is pretty cool. I personally at home use Onlyoffice in a VPS with only 2 cores and 2gb of RAM it also shares that server with a game server I run, and my VPN server as well and have never run into any problems with it. Granted I did have to give the server a 6gb swapfile, but thatās not a big deal and I havenāt noticed any slowdowns.
@keving,
Checking the recommended hardware requirements (provided by the OnlyOffice website ā URL provided below), your specifications are the minimum suggested.
On my VPS, I have 2 cores running at 2.10GHz (Xeon E5-2620), 1GB of RAM and 2GB of Swap, therefore after running simulated tests (within a KVM / QEmu environment, on a similar hardware build), I found that Collabora was using resources more efficiently.
Also it is worth noting, that due to having MySQL already installed (for use with Joomla and Nextcloud), I didnāt want to use extra resources for a secondary database framework (ie. PostgreSQL ā which is a requirement of OnlyOffice).
Just checked and it seams that it is possible to use MySQL / MariaDB with OnlyOffice.
However, because OnlyOffice does come with CRM, a Web-Mail client, document management and other tools (a lot of tools which are already included within a standardised Nextcloud installation), I think that OnlyOffice could be considered as a bit superfluous within this scenario.
Also, I noticed that OnlyOffice includes free and paid variants (the free version contains limited functionality of their CRM, document management etc. toolsets).
I think youāre talking about the OO Community Server, which wouldnāt be used in this case. Document Server is the component that would be used (and has already been documented in another thread here), and it doesnāt include any of those. But options are good, and I know there are CentOS RPMs out there for Collabora 3. But thus far, I havenāt seen that anyoneās written up an installation procedure on Neth.
This is true of both OnlyOffice and Collabora, IIRC. But the OO Document Server is AGPL 3.0, and thatās the only component weād be using.
Let me be clear that Iām not trying to argue against Collabora, or in favor of OO. Iāve gotten OO to work on Neth following these instructions, and it seems to work pretty nicely for online document editing. Compatibility with the current file formats appears good, which is something Iāve seen issues with on LibreOffice in the past. But I have some issues with it too:
As you note, requiring a separate DBMS seems needlessly redundant. Yes, my server will support it, but there isnāt an (obvious) good reason it should be required. If OO Document Server can be configured to use MySQL instead, that would avoid this issue, but their docs say Postgres is required.
Similarly, requiring nginx seems redundant when weāre already running Apache (arguments that we should change to nginx notwithstanding).
The procedure we have right now requires opening another port to the Internet. This in turn raises two concerns:
Any time you open another port to the Internet, security is a concernābut this is more on the app than on the port.
A user behind an overly-aggressive firewall (like me, when Iām at work) probably wonāt be able to access the custom port for the Document Server.
Iād expect the installation process could be adjusted (e.g., with a reverse proxy) to avoid this requirement, but Iām not sufficiently familiar with those options yet.
Though support for the current file formats is good, thereās no (apparent) support for the legacy MS Office formats, nor for the OOXML formats.
So Iām certainly not an OnlyOffice partisan, though it has the huge advantage, at the moment, of having a documented installation procedure that (at least mostly) works. Iād like to be able to compare it to Collabora, but got stuck after installing the Collabora RPMs with a ānow what?ā
@dan35,
Whilst installing Collabora, I didnāt use the RPM (or Deb) method, instead I used a docker session and rewrote the Apache virtual host configuration for reverse proxy usage.
I used something similar to what is described within the Collabora website (with a few minor differences to suite my own setup).