Server based office suite

And I thought there is a TKLPatch for it floating about but I can't find it ATM. There is already a ProjectPier appliance which is quite similar to OpenGoo/FengOffice (AFAIK they are both forks of the same base). See if that suits your needs.

Another look brought up this thread http://wiki.turnkeylinux.org/Whiteboard/OpenGoo_Appliance which doesn't look too hard to get working (we're halfway there already). At first look it doesn't appear exactly to be what we're looking for, but I'll give a try.

The only software that I can think of that may meet your needs then is GoogleDocs or Zoho or similar. We use GoogleApps at work and it works well.

Otherwise you'll need to have locally installed software such as Open/LibreOffice.

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for that. Actually, I've been testing TKL Project Pier for a couple of weeks now, and it is proving to be a perfect method for organising "milestone" organised tasks within the building and with one or two clients.

I was hoping FengOffice was going to be more akin to OpenOffice, but having installed FengOffice on a spare LAMP server we can see it's fairly limited in its capabilities. There's no Spreadsheet (despite promises in opengoo) and the Calendar function doesn't support WebDAV. So as an online office suite it falls far short of our hopes.

Cheers,

G

Thanks JedMeister,

I guess we'll have to wait. I will have another look at ThinkFree and Server-based OpenOffice, though neither is at all free or open. Hopefully, some java-based upload will become available in the near future which is a mere 140MB away from an Ubuntu based server.

Even if it uses tonnes of server CPU and RAM, these are not things in short supply anymore. I just don't want to pay for it!

Cheers,

G

And ended up with fengoffice, which, as you said, fails short. If you do find something that cover this need, please share on the forum. I think there will be people interested in working on a patch like this.

The other option is to have a desktop VM which everybody can access via remote desktop. Something like the TKLClient project could help. I'll take a look a those projects you mention.

Hi Adrian,

After having had a look at the documentation for ThinkFree, it states a requirement for Tomcat 5.5.x at least - which gives an interesting aside to how they port office to the desktop.

A local Java expert agrees with the desktop VM option you mention as being do-able.

A second look shows Open Office Anywhere is remote and cloud-based, more like GoogleApps JedMeister recommends.

Regards,

G

Good news on Feng Office. We have been running a fork from GelSheet www.gelsheet.org on a VM which now has a spreadsheet. Early impressions are it is robust, if fairly limited in functionality - including drag-and-drop, and it appears quite difficult to edit the php to customise, but a lot more than what we saw when I first enquired. Has anyone tried this or some of the other server based options like Simple Spreadsheet?

Cheers,

G 

But AFAIK OpenOffice is/was available as a cloud service (like GoogleDocs, etc). Although that was when Oracle was still at the wheel... Not sure what happened there since it has become Apache OpenOffice nor whether LibreOffice are planning/have developed something similar?