Below is a Q&A session with Galina Goduhina, Head of Sales at ONLYOFFICE. Galina tells us about the most important achievements of the ONLYOFFICE project within the past year, shares information about the major releases of the ONLYOFFICE suite during this period and brings to light some plans for the future.
A year has gone by since the CEO of your company, Lev Bannov, told us about the history of the ONLYOFFICE project and your main software products. How successful was this period for your company? Are there any new achievements that you are proud of?
Over the past 12 months, our team has been working hard to bring the ONLYOFFICE project to the next level. Not only did we focus on adding new features to the ONLYOFFICE software to makeу it more powerful but we also invested much in the development of our brand. Our international team is now bigger than ever consisting of more than 200 talented employees from all over the world. As a result, we opened two additional offices in Armenia and Singapore and entered into a partnership with a number of IT companies and hosting providers to increase our global presence.
Head of Sales at ONLYOFFICE
Apart from entering new markets, we successfully rolled out several important releases of ONLYOFFICE Docs and ONLYOFFICE Workspace, our main products. One of the most outstanding features that we released last year is fillable forms, a brand-new functionality for better document management workflows, and made countless improvements for collaborative work and security. For example, our most recent release, ONLYOFFICE Docs v7.1, comes with full animation support in presentations and several useful improvements for the PDF format, including a revamped PDF viewer and PDF to DOCX conversion. Also, ONLYOFFICE Docs v7.1 now runs on ARM-based devices, which is a good piece of news for many tech enthusiasts.
In addition to that, we made ONLYOFFICE Docs compatible with the WOPI protocol. This improvement makes it possible to integrate our office suite with the solutions that support this protocol. A striking instance is SharePoint, a web-based collaborative platform for sharing and managing content, that now easily integrates with ONLYOFFICE Docs via WOPI. Over the last few months, we also released official connectors for HumHub, Chamilo, Redmine, Jira, Moodle, Strapi and WordPress.
Finally, there is another achievement that our team is proud of. ONLYOFFICE received a gold price in the Cloud Computing Insider Awards 2021 in the File Sharing & Collaboration category. It was a big victory for our team because the contest is organized by Vogel IT-Medien, one of the most prominent publishers and IT event organizers in Germany. It’s always a pleasure to get recognition among professionals.
Last time it was said that the ONLYOFFICE team was going to announce a brand new functionality, smart forms. What are they and how do they differ from what already exists on the market?
The concept of smart forms has eventually evolved to ONLYOFFICE fillable forms. They are also known as OFORMs and allow you to make things easier while creating and filling out standard documents, such as legal agreements or business reports.
The OFORM abbreviation means “online form” and “ONLYOFFICE form”. In a nutshell, an OFORM file is a document with fillable fields where you can enter information. It can be created from scratch or using an existing Word document.
With OFORMs, we want to help our users reduce the amount of time they spend on creating documents. Now they can easily create an OFORM file online using the ONLYOFFICE suite and share it with others so that they can fill out the required fields.
ONLYOFFICE fillable forms are available on the web, desktop and mobile platforms for free starting from version 7.0. There is also a library with ready-to-use form templates on our official website, so everyone can use it for their personal purposes.
Since collaborative work is the cornerstone of your project, how did the ONLYOFFICE software improve in this regard?
When it comes to collaborative work and usability, our online editors have improved a lot over the last 12 months. One of the most long-awaited features was the introduction of Dark Theme, which was really requested by our users. Now teams can collaborate on documents more effectively at night and in dark environments.
Another useful improvement is the availability of Version History in spreadsheets and presentations. Previously, this feature was available in text documents only. Now users can browse through the drafts of their spreadsheets and presentations and restore any version if necessary with a click.
We also improved work with comments and made it easier to review documents with ONLYOFFICE Docs. However, one of the most important breakthroughs is that ONLYOFFICE makes communication during the collaboration process as easy as a piece of cake. Due to the recently released plugins for Jitsi and Rainbow, now users can communicate with each other via audio and video calls without leaving the editors’ interface.
Our next step in this direction is integrating ONLYOFFICE Docs with Zoom in the near future.
If we understand you correctly, security is another important priority for your company. Are the ONLYOFFICE products more secure now than a year ago?
We have done a great job to make the ONLYOFFICE products more secure. First of all, we opened the source code of the professional editing features in ONLYOFFICE Docs, such as document comparison, content controls and sheet views for spreadsheets. ONLYOFFICE fillable forms also became part of our open-source solutions that are available on GitHub. All this makes the ONLYOFFICE project as open as never before.
Moreover, we introduced password protection for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Now you can establish a secret word or phrase that must be used to gain access to your file. When it comes to spreadsheets, now you can do even more with ONLYOFFICE Docs. You are allowed to protect separate workbooks or sheets with a password or even protect certain cells and formulas.
New advanced access permissions allow for more efficient document management. When sharing a document, you can prevent other users from being able to copy, download or print the file. If someone is granted full access, you can prohibit changing the sharing settings. All these improvements make document sharing safer.
Last but not least, we launched a bounty program on HackerOne, one of the most popular platforms for ethical hacking. Everyone can join our program to help us discover potential bugs and vulnerabilities for a financial reward. We believe this program is a good opportunity to get in touch with the ethical hacking community and make the ONLYOFFICE software as secure as possible.
When it comes to international recognition, how are things going for ONLYOFFICE?
In this direction, we also have some achievements that we can be proud of. As I have already said, ONLYOFFICE received a gold price in the Cloud Computing Insider Awards 2021 in the
File Sharing & Collaboration category. ONLYOFFICE was nominated for this award for the first time, so we were very pleased to make such progress. By the way, this year ONLYOFFICE is nominated for the Cloud Computing Insider Award again. This time in the Cloud Content Management category.
Over the last 12 months, the ONLYOFFICE products have been also recognized as the top performer on such platforms as SoftwareSuggest and even SourceForge. This happened thanks to the support of our beloved customers.
Traditionally, the ONLYOFFICE team keeps on participating in various IT events and conferences all over the world. Over the past year, we have taken part in FOSSCOMM 2021, ownCloud Conference 2021, FOSDEM 2022, CS3 2022 and more. More importantly, we held a series of online webinars called ONLYOFFICE WebWeek where we presented the new releases of our solutions. This was a unique experience and we are eager to carry on this tradition to stay in close touch with our users and partners.
Can you please tell those who are not familiar with ONLYOFFICE yet what makes your software unique in comparison with the main competitors like Google Docs or Microsoft Office?
When you hear the word “online office suite”, it’s highly likely that you think of Microsoft Office Online or Google Docs first. At ONLYOFFICE, we want our software to be in the first place. I think we successfully compete with the products developed by the tech giants due to some advantages that our office suite has.
Firstly, ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office package the source code of which is publicly available on GitHub. If you have the required knowledge and expertise, you can check on your own how our software works or have someone do it for you. ONLYOFFICE Docs is open in the full sense of the word. This, together with an on-premises deployment model and advanced security features (for example, in-transit data encryption and JWS), makes our office suite secure by design. That’s why our users can be totally sure that their data is under their control.
Another important difference is that, unlike the tech giants, ONLYOFFICE doesn’t lock the customers into its collaborative ecosystem. You have a free hand to choose how to use the ONLYOFFICE online editors – either in combination with ONLYOFFICE Workspace, our enterprise-ready groupware solution, or within any sync&share or ECM service like Nextcloud, Alfresco, Moodle, Redmine, SharePoint, Confluence, Seafile, etc. What’s more, you are even allowed to embed ONLYOFFICE Docs into the software solution you’re building yourself. For example, our online office suite is currently built into more than 200 web services all over the world, and this number is constantly increasing.
Thirdly, our office suite offers some unique collaborative features that you won’t find in other office suites. I mean that in ONLYOFFICE Docs you can instantly switch between two co-editing modes. The Fast mode is somewhat traditional because it allows you to see all the changes being made in real time. The Strict mode is designed for more private co-editing. When this mode is active, no one will see what you type until you press the Save button. Additionally, ONLYOFFICE comes with advanced access permissions, so you can easily decide who can perform certain actions and who can’t.
Finally, the default functionality of ONLYOFFICE Docs can be significantly extended via plugins. They allow you to connect third-party services and turn ONLYOFFICE Docs into something more powerful than an ordinary office suite. For example, you can connect the Jitsi and Rainbow plugins to enjoy high-quality audio and video calls while co-editing documents with your colleagues. The Telegram plugin allows you to exchange text messages so that you don’t
need to keep your mobile phone close to you all the time. Multiple spell checking and grammar checking services, like LanguageTool, can help you to hone your written content.
What are your plans for the future?
We have a lot of plans on our roadmap. First of all, we are planning to develop further the concept of ONLYOFFICE fillable forms. We want to make them more secure by allowing users to add digital signatures and enabling data encryption in OFORMs. Another priority is our mobile applications for iOS and Android. We want to make it easier for users and create and edit fillable forms on mobile devices on the go.
Apart from fillable forms, we are also planning to create new connectors for ONLYOFFICE Docs. The idea is simple – we want to enable the integration of our office suite with such mainstream solutions as Monday, Trello and Slack.
It’s also worth mentioning that we are working on implementing ONLYOFFICE Docs in the cloud. We understand that some customers don’t have the required resources to deploy our office suite on-premises and just want to get an out-of-the-box solution without having to worry about configuring and updating it. ONLYOFFICE Docs in the cloud is intended to get rid of all this hassle.
Finally, we have the intention to launch a new marketplace for ONLYOFFICE plugins. This will help our users to find and install what they need in a few clicks. In addition to that, we are planning to extend the existing collection of plugins by adding the ones that will help automate routine tasks.
To cut it short, we are not planning to halt our work on making ONLYOFFICE as powerful and user-friendly as possible. We believe that our project has a bright future and are eager to do our best to make it happen.
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