Use your own Office Suite in the cloud with OnlyOffice

The cloud is in fashion, we know it, and large companies like Microsoft, are uploading their main applications to be used from the network. In the world of Office automation, there are undoubtedly two great leaders: Google Docs and Microsoft's Office Online, but I just found out via unixmen, a new alternative that we can install on our own server.

What is OnlyOffice?

only Office is an open source web application that allows us to set up a collaborative platform for SMEs on our own server. It includes an Enterprise and a Community version, and of course, in this article I will tell you how to install the latter on our own server.

What does OnlyOffice offer us?

Document management- It allows us to share our documents with our co-workers and users outside the portal, and includes version control and full revisions.

Online document editor: We can edit multi-page real-time reports, financial or business documentation in many formats with other users: PDF, TXT, DOCX, DOC, ODT, RTF, HTML, EPUB, XLS, XLSX, ODS, CSV, HTML, and PPTX.

Project management: We can use milestones, tasks, and subtasks to determine priorities between our primary goals and daily activities. We can use the Gantt chart to see our progress in the various assigned tasks, we can manage our time, among other things.

CRM and billing: We can manage a database with our clients, and create invoices directly on the platform.

Email aggregator: We can add our GMail account for example, to link it with the platform. We can add a mail server using our own domain name to create corporate mailboxes for the members of our team, and all this integrated with the rest of the OnlyOffice functionalities.

Instant messaging:

Does it convince you? Let's see how to install it then ..

Requirements for installing OnlyOffice

The OnlyOffice installation was done on Ubuntu Server 14.04 without any web server installed. 2GB of RAM, 2-core processor and 40GB of disk space are recommended.

If we have installed Apache, because we must eliminate or stop it, because the platform uses Nginx.

$ sudo apt remove apache2

Let's get started. We open a terminal and put:

$ sudo wget http://download.onlyoffice.com/repo/onlyoffice.key && sudo apt-key add onlyoffice.key

When finished we edit the file / Etc / apt / sources.list and we add:

deb http://download.onlyoffice.com/repo/debian squeeze main

Now it only remains to execute:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install onlyoffice

The installation process will begin, asking for a password for MySQL. When it finishes we will be able to access our server. We just have to put the IP address in the browser and it will come out something like this:

Once it is finished, we will be asked to choose a password, a (valid) email address to register our account, and we can choose the language of the platform and the time zone:

And when we finish we will get this:

We can start working and enjoy the advantages that I mentioned at the beginning of the post, but I also said that we would not have the Online Editor.

Installing the OnlyOffice Online Editor

This happens because for it to work you need a higher version of mono, mysql and some libraries. But we can solve it easily.

We edit the file / Etc / apt / sources.list and we add:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-toolchain-r/test/ubuntu trusty main

Then we execute:

$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp: //keyserver.ubuntu.com: 80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF $ echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-xamarin.list $ sudo apt-get update

Once finished we type:

$ sudo apt upgrade && apt install mysql-server-5.6 mysql-common-5.6 mysql-client-5.6

Once all of this is installed, we will be able to access the online editor through the same URL that we used previously.

And that's it .. 😉