Below is a Q&A session with Lev Bannov, Founder and CEO at ONLYOFFICE. Lev tells us about the ONLYOFFICE history and products, highlights its competitive advantages and reflects upon the future of the project and document processing software in general.
Can you please tell us about your company? When was ONLYOFFICE established, and what are your goals?
The history of ONLYOFFICE dates back to 2009 when a project called TeamLab took off. It focused on collaborative project management tools for teams. After a while, the developers released a new solution that was the first online office suite based on HTML5 canvas technology.
Founder and CEO at ONLYOFFICE
In 2014, the product was officially rebranded as ONLYOFFICE, and its source code became available to the public. Thus, ONLYOFFICE was an open-source alternative for document collaboration that offered maximum compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files due to the use of OOXML as its core formats.
Nowadays, ONLYOFFICE is an internationally recognized, fast-growing project with a strong focus on document processing and collaboration technologies with team productivity tools. It offers accessible, powerful and secure software for all kinds of businesses.
At ONLYOFFICE, we firmly believe in the principle of division of labour within the software industry. We are sure that we have found our own role in the market — digital documents.
What are your main products now? Only office software tools?
The main focus of our project has always been on document processing, so our top-tier product is ONLYOFFICE Docs. It’s a collaborative office suite that allows users to create, edit and co-author documents, spreadsheets and presentations in real time. The suite is fully compatible with Microsoft Office formats and easily integrates with other file-sharing platforms and document management systems like Nextcloud, ownCloud, SharePoint, Seafile, Alfresco, Confluence, etc.
There is also an enterprise-ready solution called ONLYOFFICE Workspace. It’s a collaboration platform combined with an online office suite. The software allows users to store and manage documents and files, control and analyze projects, collect and process emails, build customer relationships via a CRM system, issue invoices, plan events using personal or group calendars or even create a corporate social network with blogs, news boards, forums, etc.
We constantly work on making our products better and plan to add more features for more comfortable document processing. For example, we want to improve work with PDF files and introduce the concept of smart documents in our solutions to facilitate paper workflows within companies.
Among the different features that ONLYOFFICE can offer, can you pick the top 3 that you consider to be the most significant ones?
The first feature is collaborative work. The ONLYOFFICE Docs suite combines editors for documents, spreadsheets and presentations that are as powerful as Microsoft Office and as collaborative as Google Docs, but offering a secure self-hosted alternative for the most security-savvy enterprises.
The next feature is Private Rooms that are a new approach to end-to-end document encryption where every bit of data is encrypted that allows for secure effortless sharing and collaboration on protected files.
Last but not least, it’s the new concept of smart forms that we are about to announce. It is a brand new functionality that will help our users automate their paperwork routine.
Do your solutions have any restrictions related to non-Windows operating systems (e.g. macOS, Linux)?
ONLYOFFICE works perfectly on all platforms and has support for servers with Linux derivatives and Windows Server. The ONLYOFFICE desktop suite runs on PCs with any operating system and on Mac computers (including the 2020 models on Apple Silicon), and the mobile apps are available for both iOS and Android devices.
What industries do you serve and who are your customers?
Being the core IT component of any business as a collaborative office, ONLYOFFICE is used by organizations of all sizes and sectors, from education and nonprofits to big law firms and the financial sector.
ONLYOFFICE is also very popular in the spheres of higher education and governmental organizations thanks to the ability to integrate ONLYOFFICE Docs in any existing environment built on sharing platforms like Nextcloud, ownCloud, SharePoint, Alfresco and dozens of other services.
What are your Company’s results reached so far, in terms of growth and number of clients?
ONLYOFFICE is a sustainably and confidently growing project, and there is nothing we can complain about. It grows both in quality and the abilities of its products, and its worldwide market share increases all the time.
It is hard to calculate the real growth rate because we do not use any tracking tools and freely distribute many of our products.
From what we know about our commercial contracts and installations, ONLYOFFICE is used by over 7 million users worldwide and grows from 40 to 50 per cent a year. We surely want this stable development to continue.
What are your plans? What’s in store for ONLYOFFICE in the future?
We don’t want to make any radical moves or go for dramatic changes in what we create. Our community has many existing requests for improving and enhancing our products which will be the top priority for the next few years.
We think that the future of ONLYOFFICE in the document processing software market is very promising. Of course, there will still be tech giants like Google and Microsoft, but ONLYOFFICE will be an excellent alternative solution. With document management processes becoming more and more digitised, ONLYOFFICE is and will be a great option for companies and teams who are looking for more private and secure online document editors.
Besides, ONLYOFFICE is the right choice for developers that want to enable document editing in their own solutions. We are looking for collaboration, not competition, and ready to enter mutually beneficial partnerships. We are confident that our editors will be in high demand as part of business-oriented SaaS solutions offered by other companies, like document management systems, digital workspaces, collaborative platforms and so on.
Cooperation and division of labour are the future of document processing, and ONLYOFFICE will undoubtedly be an important part of these processes.
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