Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?

eganonoa

@timconsidine said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

Collaboration for me is working together on a document at more or less the same time. The number of times I have seen this actually happen in business is minimal.

100% agree. This is exactly what i take collaboration to mean and it is truly a rare thing, not often needed at all.

jdaviescoates

@chetbaker said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

The thing with the nextcloud implementation is that you can't work in the same markdown doc at the same time with a colleague.

Pretty sure you can

necrevistonnezr

@timconsidine said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

Working together on a document at different times is way more common, so common that it is almost the only scenario to consider in practice. In this scenario, tracked changes is what really matters.
Unless they have made a lot of improvements I haven't seen, on this Google is a distant 2nd to MS Word or any of the alternatives.
In many sectors (eg legal and commercial teams), collaboration is a fringe outlier, tracked changes is what matters.

Fully agree. I work in a legal team, tracked changes and using the exact same document format as the other contractual party is a must. You can’t start telling JP Morgan on the other side to please use markdown or „Sorry, you won’t see all my amendments because I used LibreOffice“. And in these industries, „collaboration“ is exchanging lengthy agreement drafts via email.

timconsidine

@necrevistonnezr said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

start telling JP Morgan on the other side to please use markdown

Would love to see their reaction ! "what down ? I use mouse not arrow keys "

fbartels

@necrevistonnezr said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

on the other side to please use markdown

Markdown is a nice markup, but as said before not really handy for non technical users. Depending on the document you want to work on Markdown could also be "too simple", but Latex is an even harder pill to swallow for the average user.

jdaviescoates

@chetbaker might be worth taking a look at https://docs.plus which is a fork of Etherpad with a load of plugins

jdaviescoates

@eganonoa said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

And Nextcloud talk is, I think, the very best for one-to-one calls.

Especially if the plan is to work together on a document. I've found this experience to be great too (both co-editing an OnlyOffice doc, or working together on a Nextcloud Text doc).

timconsidine

@jdaviescoates said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

might be worth taking a look at https://docs.plus

Looks great !
A good candidate for Cloudron ?
(Haven't looked yet at the install and system requirements.)
EDIT : I see there is a Wishlist for this

nebulon

since docs+ is really just etherpad with plugins, I wonder if our current etherpad could not be improved in that direction already.

timconsidine

@nebulon yes !
I was checking out how to build a package ... but would much rather leave it to the professionals !
I like Etherpad but docs+ would be even better.

micmc

As per realtime collaboration on docs using Markdown I don't know if anyone had tried but HedgeDoc available here on Cloudron is amazing.

There also exist imho a great altenative to MS/G docs for the documents work with team collaboration it's called Quip and I use to use it a few years back when it started, and before I start to move to more private/secure/nosniff/notrack solutions, and it works pretty well, only in the like of MS/G they're SaaS and not FOSS. On that I'm with @timconsidine and would rather adopt and make all that is possible to get us/people away from big tech dominance as they've become a plea imo, especially in the last two years. So let's get back our tech, our web, our Internet and so let's work on open source as much as we can in all cases we can.

marcusquinn

@chetbaker Try Group Office? It also uses Collabora for editing docs:

I used it years ago, before Google Apps was even a thing, and was very happy with it then.

Looks like they have kept pace with modernising the interface and refining.

The Studio is brilliant, and you can make almost any other business app with that and using existing data.

If I didn't already have a happy solution with EspoCRM, I'd say Group Office would be up there as one I'd be happy to use or recommend.

marcusquinn

Zoho would be high on my list for non-FOSS alternatives to Google Apps / Microsoft Office. They say a lot of the right things on privacy, ethics, and EU hosting:

humptydumpty

@marcusquinn +1 for Zoho. I've used their premium services before I found Cloudron.

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Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?