We interviewed Galina Goduhina from the ONLYOFFICE project (Office Suite for Linux)

Hello my friend reader! Today I am pleased to bring you a very cool interview that I had the opportunity to do with the developers of ONLYOFFICE, a differentiated Office suite that has versions for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Galina OnlyOffice Only Office (stylized as ONLYOFFICE), a recently opened open source office with text editing, presentation creation and spreadsheet manipulation programs. I used it several times to open Microsoft formats, where LibreOffice was not so effective over the last year and it did very well in most cases.

Now, for you to know a little more about the history of this software so interesting and useful that it has become open source and now works in community with various professional features like cloud support and servers with shared and collaborative documents. one of the project leaders, Galinda Goduhina.

Diolinux Interview: ONLYOFFICE

Diolinux: What is the origin of ONLYOFFICE? Could you tell us a little bit of the story behind the program and the company?

Galina: We started ONLYOFFICE over seven years ago. Initially we called it Teamlab, and it was a platform for project management and internal collaboration. At the same time, we worked in online document editors. Later we decided to put the projects together.

The idea was to create a single workspace for all the daily tasks that any business faces. And our users really enjoyed this united platform and we felt great support from the community. But we also understood that our document editors were something special to us, and that we found something really special with this technology. We have a team that can do wonders.Diolinux: How is ONLYOFFICE different from other market alternatives?

Galina: Firstly I must point out the interface in HTML5, our online editors are based on this technology. This has allowed us to build extremely high quality online editors for document formatting and conversion, as well as the desktop application suite.

We were able to do something important in the file entry and exit issue. A file processed on ONLYOFFICE retains the same style, paragraphs, symbols, line spacing, and so on, in any browser and any operating system, and of course also during printing. We have added formatting features that were previously only available in desktop editors, in addition to this we have the combination with real-time document collaboration and co-editing capabilities across the cloud.

Online "ONLYOFFICE Editors" now has more formatting features than MS Office online and more collaborative features than Google Docs.

As we always wanted to create a desktop application – to get rid of browser limitations and to work directly with system resources – this happened right after that. Whoever uses ONLYOFFICE this way has much more speed.

The desktop version called "ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors" was developed with the same core code as the online version. This means that they are cross-platform and fully compatible. Since the application was born from ONLYOFFICE online, you are only working in "offline mode", allowing you to connect through the application installed on your computer to a private network, access your files and work from there without having to open your browser. for this. This is our big advantage over LibreOffice. Also, compared to Libre, we definitely have better support for MS Office formats.

Diolinux: Why of interest in launching software for Linux too?

Galina: We aimed to create a cross-platform solution for people to use ONLYOFFICE regardless of the machine they own and the operating system they prefer. And of course the Linux community is a lot of fun to work with. Linux users are demanding, very demanding, and they have been our driving force and our source of inspiration in many cases.

Diolinux: In relation to the Brazilian public. Some of our readers reported that they would like the interface of the program to be available in Brazilian Portuguese, as well as support for accentuation.Galina: We are working on translating the interface into several languages ​​now. Any native speaker can volunteer and join the team of our translators. Just contact us for this. As for the accentuation, there is really a problem because of the Chromium embedded framework used as one of the components in the software and unfortunately we will have to wait until we fix it. But good news is that the spell checker already works in your language.Diolinux: Why do you decide to open the application source code?

Galina: That came naturally. We realize that data security is a very important issue for many companies, especially when it comes to documents. We want to be open, we want people to be able to trust us, not just for our word, but for the code and transparency as well. In addition, we need to overcome this barrier that people have in mind, these strong convictions that "there is nothing but Microsoft Office" that nothing better can be created.

We chose the AGPLv3 license for our program. This means you can use ONLYOFFICE without restrictions, but if you want to integrate it for your own solution you will have to open your source code too and distribute it with the same license.

Diolinux: Is there any way the public can collaborate with the development of the application? How it works?

Galina: Certainly! There are several ways to contribute to ONLYOFFICE. You can join our GitHub developer team, test ONLYOFFICE, and report issues through our developer forum or Stackoverflow. ONLYOFFICE also offers an API for everyone to extend the functionality of the software by creating plugins and integrating it with their own applications and tools, as many of our partners already do, all help us to continue.

Diolinux: Thank you so much for the opportunity to interview them, please leave a final message for our readers.

Galina: We at ONLYOFFICE have created really cool document editors for you. A free, open program independent of browser, system or device. We look forward to welcoming you as part of our community! Thanks for your attention and have a great day!

An interesting option for you!

If you liked what you read and would like to try ONLYOFFICE yourself, just access the site and download it to your system or access the same online editor.

See you next time!

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