With today’s release of the Office Online Integration app, enterprises can use a self-hosted Microsoft Office Online Server to view and edit documents from within Nextcloud. This enables companies to operate an Office environment on a private, secure server with a familiar user interface and full compatibility with Microsoft Office formats.
About Office Online Server
As Microsoft explains in their documentation:
Office Online Server is an Office server product that provides browser-based file viewing and editing services for Office files. Office Online Server works with products and services that support WOPI, the Web app Open Platform Interface protocol.
Office Online Server includes Word Online, Excel Online, PowerPoint Online and OneNote Online. Office Online Server runs on dedicated servers or a virtual machine, and thus fits in a on-premises environment with Nextcloud.
Collaborative editing is supported, allowing multiple users to work together in the same document, seeing what the other users are doing.
Integration
From within Nextcloud, Office Online Server is well integrated like our other online office solutions, allowing users to directly view and edit documents without having to open other tabs or windows. Our sidebar is available so users can comment, share, see previous versions and even chat during editing. They can also drop a office document in a Talk chat room and edit it with the other participants during a call.
Benefits
The Office Online Server option allows enterprises to migrate users from cloud services or locally installed office applications to a web based work flow, fully on-premises and under control of the IT department. Users get the interface they are familiar with, and great document compatibility.
Administrators can install the app and get started now.
I suppose Nextcloud built this integration because the current Nextcloud services like Collabra and OnlyOffice apparently don’t meet the requirements of some in one way or the other.
To use the integration it appears you will need a license. You can argue whether that is on-topic but at least very closely related and a basic requirement for the integration offered.
I agree with many that this does not really agree with the Nextcloud philosophy on open source, however the MS Office Online Server should at least enable you to run it on-premises. Your warning regarding data collecting is appropriate as it is not clear what data will be exchanged or must be exchanged due to updates etc. with the Microsoft servers even when hosted on premises. There are ways to block that with firewalls, but the question is whether that would somehow cripple the product or even go against the license and support agreement.
I’m running OnlyOffice on a separate server which I believe provides a good level of compatibility and speed with MS Office and is adequate for up to 20 users without further license costs. However their license/cost and support model might not work for everyone hence I welcome alternatives to cover more use cases including Collabra and MS Office Online Server.
That was not my intention, just to clarify, inform and understand what existing OR new license and cost may be required to use this integration. We had similar and useful discussions about OnlyOffice and Collabra license models, but perhaps a separate thread is appropriate.