LibreOffice Online announced [LWN.net]

From:		"italo-AT-documentfoundation.org" <italo-AT-documentfoundation.org>
To:		lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		LibreOffice to become the cornerstone of the world's first universal productivity solution
Date:		Wed, 25 Mar 2015 13:33:33 +0000
Message-ID:		<c1b5217515f95737accd1fed4b29a119@phplist.com>

Berlin, March 25, 2015 - LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever, is
set to become the cornerstone of the world's first global personal
productivity solution - LibreOffice Online - following an announcement by
IceWarp and Collabora of a joint development effort. LibreOffice is
available as a native application for every desktop OS, and is currently
under development for Android. In addition, it is available on virtual
platforms for Chrome OS, Firefox OS and iOS.

"LibreOffice was born with the objective of leveraging the OpenOffice
heritage to build a solid ecosystem capable of attracting those investments
which are key for the further development of free software," says Eliane
Domingos de Sousa, Director of The Document Foundation. "Thanks to the
increasing number of companies which are investing on the development of
LibreOffice, we are on track to make it available on every platform,
including the cloud. We are grateful to IceWarp for providing the resources
for a further development of LibreOffice Online."

Development of LibreOffice Online started back in 2011, with the
availability of a proof of concept of the client front end, based on HTML5
technology. That proof of concept will be developed into a state of the art
cloud application, which will become the free alternative to proprietary
solutions such as Google Docs and Office 365, and the first to natively
support the Open Document Format (ODF) standard.

"It is wonderful to marry IceWarp's vision and investment with our passion
and skills for LibreOffice development. It is always satisfying to work on
something that, as a company, we have a need for ourselves," says Michael
Meeks, Vice President of Collabora Productivity, who developed the proof of
concept back in 2011 and will oversee the development of LibreOffice
Online.

The availability of LibreOffice Online will be communicated at a later
stage.

--

to post comments

LibreOffice Online announced

Posted Mar 25, 2015 15:03 UTC (Wed) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link] (3 responses)

Great news :)

But please look around before claiming to be the first to natively support ODF in a browser: http://www.webodf.org/ has been around for a while.

LibreOffice Online announced

Posted Mar 25, 2015 15:36 UTC (Wed) by oever (guest, #987) [Link] (1 responses)

Michael Meeks was at the first presentation that I ever gave on WebODF back in 2010. He probably co-wrote or proof-read this text. I do wish LibreOffice all the best, also with this effort. The more free software that edits ODF, the better. Of course, I do prefer to run the office client-side in the browser, so that editing can continue even without network connection. This is too far for LibreOffice at the moment, but perhaps it can be compiled with emscripten to run completely in the browser in the future.

Apart from WebODF, there is also OX Documents, which has been around for a while and also natively supports ODF.

LibreOffice Online announced

Posted Mar 27, 2015 17:53 UTC (Fri) by webmink (guest, #47180) [Link]

OX Documents is not open source.

LibreOffice Online announced

Posted Mar 26, 2015 1:30 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Well, they didn't actually say "in the browser". It sounds like they meant to say the first cloud application to natively support ODF. ... and as fluffy as that statement is, it's still not entirely clear that is, indeed, what they were trying to say.. oh well, great news nonetheless!