Free and open source office suite and Microsoft Office alternative LibreOffice is building a new functionality for its Writer word processor – and the goal of that is to provide an alternative to Google Docs.
But what distinguishes the kind of distributed real-time collaboration, now being prototyped, from both the Google product and LibreOffice-based Collabora Online, is that users will be working on local documents that are on their own devices, rather than on someone else’s, that is, in the cloud.
Thorsten Behrens from Allotropia – one of the many contributors to LibreOffice’s development – presented the project at this year’s Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM), revealing that a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) is at the heart of this model of collaboration functionality.
When the project was announced, its developers explained that in addition to choosing the best CRDT, the first steps involved re-architecting Writer’s comment and then change tracking implementation.
Once integrated into the word processor, the real-time collaborative capability will be available to a number of distributed LibreOffice instances, on desktop, mobile, and server/online.
While at FOSDEM, Behrens also spoke about ZetaOffice, another piece of software based on LibreOffice and fully compatible with it, but one that can run in a browser and is in a much more advanced stage of development: currently in beta, with the release of the first version expected to happen soon.
ZetaOffice allows users to access their documents from any device, while at the same time maintaining complete control over their data, since third-party cloud services are not involved.
Besides Writer, ZetaOffice offers the Calc spreadsheet program, and Impress for creating media presentations. It can be self-hosted or deployed with ZetaOffice’s own CND.
Other than running in a browser, ZetaOffice is also available as a native desktop program for Linux and Windows.
ZetaOffice comes with the zeta.js library that allows integrating an instance of the program into a website.
LibreOffice is a project of the Document Foundation developed collaboratively, that in 2010 forked from the now discontinued OpenOffice productivity suite.
