Collabora Online in Nethserver-Nextcloud

I think you’re talking about the OO Community Server, which wouldn’t 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 doesn’t include any of those. But options are good, and I know there are CentOS RPMs out there for Collabora 3. But thus far, I haven’t seen that anyone’s 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 that’s the only component we’d be using.

Let me be clear that I’m not trying to argue against Collabora, or in favor of OO. I’ve 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 I’ve 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 isn’t 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 we’re 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 concern–but this is more on the app than on the port.
    • A user behind an overly-aggressive firewall (like me, when I’m at work) probably won’t be able to access the custom port for the Document Server.
    • I’d expect the installation process could be adjusted (e.g., with a reverse proxy) to avoid this requirement, but I’m not sufficiently familiar with those options yet.
  • Though support for the current file formats is good, there’s no (apparent) support for the legacy MS Office formats, nor for the OOXML formats.

So I’m 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. I’d like to be able to compare it to Collabora, but got stuck after installing the Collabora RPMs with a “now what?”

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