‘Communicate, Collaborate, Empower and Reward’ represent the main pillars of eXo Platform. Features like enterprise social networking, corporate or team spaces, document management and task management represent the backbone of our digital workplace solution.
Throughout the years, our teams have been working on various features and projects to cover all four pillars and provide our clients with a holistic solution capable of meeting their growing needs and expectations. The eXo Wallet, gamification and Kudos features represent prime examples of projects designed to reinforce one of the ‘Reward’ pillars.
On the ‘Collaborate’ and ‘Empower’ fronts, we have noticed that the need to edit office documents right inside the solution was a priority for both our clients and our prospects. As a result, we decided to introduce a co-editing add-on to our latest version in partnership with OnlyOffice.
In this blog post we will present the ‘OnlyOffice add-on’ and highlight its benefits and how it can be used effectively.
Let us start by introducing the OnlyOffice Suite:
ONLYOFFICE is an open-source office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA. It offers a powerful office suite that comprises online editors for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations highly compatible with Microsoft Office file formats. By partnering with ONLYOFFICE, eXo Platform completes its existing integrations with mainstream office stacks by an open-source alternative that improves the overall user experience and brings a significant value to clients and prospects that require on-premise installations.
The OnlyOffice add-on for eXo Platform comes with a number of benefits including the following:
- Co-edit documents in real time;
- Track changes and compare different versions;
- Facilitate access to information;
- Reduce duplicated knowledge and keep teams on the same track;
- An on-premise deployment for more control.
How to use the OnlyOffice add-on:
Now let us see how you can edit documents using the OnlyOffice add-on.
The key feature is accessible directly from the activity stream via the ‘Edit online’ button at the bottom of the document posts.
You can also see it in the action bar when you open a document for preview in the document library.
Once you click on ‘Edit Online’, the OnlyOffice online editor will be loaded in a new tab. There, you will be able to edit the document using a set of different actions similar to typical desktop office suites like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Additionally, the OnlyOffice editors have a collaboration menu in which you can add comments; track, accept and reject changes; and choose a display mode (editing, final and original modes).
Under the collaboration menu, two co-editing modes are available: fast and strict.
- Fast is the default mode and shows the changes made by other users in real time.
- Strict is selected to hide the changes made by other users until you click on ‘Save’ to save the changes you and other users have made.
Once you have finished editing the document, you can mark the changes by clicking on the ‘Save’ icon and adding a brief summary of the changes on the top bar. You can also save the changes by simply closing the tab.
A comment will be automatically generated on the post containing a brief description along with a notification.
A list of the different versions will be immediately generated with the name of the users who performed the changes along with the date and time and a brief summary. You can view, restore or delete the selected versions.
You can compare versions by clicking on ‘Compare selected versions’. This way, the changes will be highlighted and you will always be able to keep up to date with the latest edits.
Allowing teams to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge more effectively are our main goals here at eXo. With each new version, we have tried to provide our clients with a modern and complete digital workplace solution tailored to their needs. The new OnlyOffice add-on represents the latest addition to our solution. It is already available as a free trial for our existing clients and will be generally available along with our upcoming version 5.3.
We are continuously planning for new upgrades. You are welcome to leave your feedback, questions and suggestions here. And make sure to follow our blog to stay up to date with any new developments.
