Nextcloud and OnlyOffice Integration

Nextcloud and OnlyOffice Integration

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Basil Hendroff submitted a new resource:

Nextcloud and OnlyOffice Integration - A collection of notes on how to integrate OnlyOffice with NextCloud.

This is a collection of notes on how to get OnlyOffice working in Nextcloud. To realise this, a number of building blocks need to be put together.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have issues with steps 1 and 2 below, please DO NOT post those issues in the discussion area for this resource. However, in the context of Nextcloud-OnlyOffice integration, if you have some useful information on steps 1 and 2 that may benefit other forum members, please post your experience in the discussion area...

Read more about this resource...
 

Ericloewe

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This OnlyOffice thing seems to be gunning for Office 365 functionality, which is a distinct bonus that makes LibreOffice look positively archaic.

What's your experience with it? I hate monopolies as much as anyone, but I find myself 100% locked to Office 365 (and traditional Office, LibreOffice can't even replace that without a good amount of pain).
 
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You're not alone. Microsoft and Google products somehow seem to insidiously find their way into our lives and I think it's almost impossible to extricate ourselves from this plight.

This is hot off the press for me. I've not actually used the suite much at all at this stage, apart from making sure I can fire up the office applications from within Nextcloud and save documents with some basic edits back into Nextcloud. I've not even had a chance to try out the mobile and desktop apps yet.

I know there's been keen interest amongst FreeNAS Nextcloud users in getting OnlyOffice integration happening. There have been a number of attempts and some have got quite close, but haven't quite hit the mark. Part of the reason for this I believe are the underlying structures required to support the integration.

From what I've seen so far, there seems to be quite a lot of potential with OnlyOffice. For instance, the Community Edition (that's installed) is free to use for up to 20 users. That's fantastic for a home or small business such as a not-for-profit that can't afford to pay the per-user annual fee for Office 365. According to this table, the Community Edition is missing web editors, document comparison and content controls, but I don't think the average user is likely to miss those features.

There's a bold statement on this web page, from Ascensio System SIA, the owners of OnlyOffice, of '100% compatibility with MS Office formats'. That might be true, but if I recall my own experiences with LibreOffice, it had difficulty with 'smart documents' that included any VBA scripting. I wouldn't be surprised if that were true with OnlyOffice as well. On the other hand, the slideshow on the web page does suggest that OnlyOffice is more capable that Office 365 in a number of areas. Google office apps were, when I last used them, quite limited in comparison to Office 365. For instance, at the time, I wasn't able to create a table of contents with Google Docs. OnlyOffice holds some promise in this area. (Edit: Google Docs now has the capability to build ToC's)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to exploring OnlyOffice in the coming days and weeks and I'll post back anything I find that might be of wider interest.
 
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This OnlyOffice thing seems to be gunning for Office 365 functionality
As it runs in your own environment, an advantage of the Nextcloud-OnlyOffice arrangement is that you're not having to hand your data over to a third-party like Microsoft or Google. However, as @Heracles points out in this Nextcloud forum post, think twice about moving away from the third-party, unless you've done enough to mitigate the risks around availability and reliability.
 
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According to this table, the Community Edition is missing web editors, document comparison and content controls, but I don't think the average user is likely to miss those features.
The exclusions somewhat diminish the value of the OnlyOffice Community Edition as document comparison, content controls and web editors are features many users have come to expect from an office suite. These are present in Microsoft and Google online office products. Web editors was a feature recently revoked. It caused considerable furore within the Nextcloud community. You can get a sense of it here.
 
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...for mobile devices, as I understand it.
That's correct. Ascensio System SIA seem to have obscured this in their marketing literature by using the term 'web editors'.
 
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For a licensing comparison of the free editions of OnlyOffice and Collabora, refer to this post.
 

NasKar

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Decided to try openoffice before I got your message about my error installing Callabora. I thought I finally had it working but ran into an issue at the last step.
I can reach my nextcloud via cloud.mydomain.com.
office.mydomain.com open the openoffice suite.
After step 6 I try to create a document and get the error message
"ONLYOFFICE cannot be reached. Please contact admin"
Any ideas is there a place I can look for a log file?
 
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To access the OnlyOffice log, enter sudo docker logs onlyoffice-document-server from the Ubuntu VM terminal.

Also, double-check that you are accessing the OnlyOffice server and not the Collabora server by mistake.

When setting up the connector at step 6, on clicking SAVE if you don't see the message 'Settings have been successfully updated' flash up on the top right of the screen, you have a problem with the paths to your Nextcloud or Document Server.
 
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NasKar

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The Collaora VM is turned off.
Only office log scrolls this alot
Code:
Flushing stats at  Fri Apr 24 2020 01:42:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
{ counters:
   { 'statsd.bad_lines_seen': 0,
     'statsd.packets_received': 0,
     'statsd.metrics_received': 0 },
  timers: {},
  gauges: { 'statsd.timestamp_lag': 0 },
  timer_data: {},
  counter_rates:
   { 'statsd.bad_lines_seen': 0,
     'statsd.packets_received': 0,
     'statsd.metrics_received': 0 },
  sets: {},
  pctThreshold: [ 90 ] }
 
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Only office log scrolls this a lot
Yes, that's normal. Not particularly useful. That's why I didn't reference it in the resource.

When setting up the connector at step 6, on clicking SAVE if you don't see the message 'Settings have been successfully updated' flash up on the top right of the screen, you have a problem with the paths to your Nextcloud or Document Server.
Check this as well.
 
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@NasKar How did you go verifying the paths for the OnlyOffice connector?
 
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Web editors was a feature recently revoked. It caused considerable furore within the Nextcloud community. You can get a sense of it here.
Well, it appears that Ascensio System SIA has quietly reintroduced, without any fanfare, partial mobile editing in OnlyOffice. There's no official word on their website, and the feature could disappear again. This makes OnlyOffice quite an attractive option again for those requiring mobile editing of office documents.

Below is a table summarising the current editing capabilities of various mobile office offerings for Nextcloud.

screenshot.290.png

N = View only
 
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NasKar

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How did you go verifying the paths for the OnlyOffice connector?
You were correct the top link set as https://cloud.mydomain.cf/ds-vpath/ and should have been https://office.mydomain.cf/ds-vpath/. The weird thing was correcting it the first time didn't stick. It all works now thanks for your help.
 

KevDog

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Here is my docker-compose for OnlyOffice. I really like OnlyOffice in terms of performance. I can't comment on OO vs Office365 since I'm really not doing a lot of advanced editing.

I've included some commented lines if you want to run a different docker image. Adjust the ports as necessary. My OO docker image runs behind an nginx reverse proxy on the docker host. This isn't a requirement. I've included a few commented lines if you want to use SSL certs within the container. With SSL certs you would probably want to adjust your port choice accordingly.

Code:
  onlyoffice-document-server:
    container_name: onlyoffice-document-server
#    image: onlyoffice/documentserver:latest
    image: onlyoffice/documentserver-ie
    entrypoint: bash -c "wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Zegorax/OnlyOffice-Unlimited/master/install.sh && bash install.sh"
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - net
    ports:
      - 127.0.0.1:8080:80
#      - 8080:80
#      - 127.0.0.1:444:443
#      - 444:443
    volumes:
#      - document_data:/var/www/onlyoffice/Data
      - /var/log/onlyoffice:/var/log/onlyoffice
#      - /etc/letsencrypt/privkey.pem:/var/www/onlyoffice/Data/certs/onlyoffice.key:ro
#      - /etc/letsencrypt/fullchain.pem:/var/www/onlyoffice/Data/certs/onlyoffice.crt:ro
#      - /etc/letsencrypt/dhparam.pem:/var/www/onlyoffice/Data/certs/dhparam.pem:ro
    environment:
      - TZ=America/Chicago
      - ONLYOFFICE_HTTPS_HSTS_ENABLED=false
#      - SSL_VERIFY_CLIENT=off
      - JWT_ENABLED=true
      - JWT_SECRET=secret
      - JWT_HEADER=Authorization
 
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KevDog

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Yes you can definitely run without ssl. Change listening port to 80 and remove ssl lines in reverse proxy. With docker put ssl.enable=false
 

adrianwi

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