Increase Remote Work Efficiency With ONLYOFFICE [Review 2020]

Documents are a fundamental component of any business or an association. It is reviewed, revised, and shared among many individuals via emails, social media, and whatnot. Coming down to the tech aspect of making documents, we have a new challenger in this region, and till now, we have found it quite fascinating while we tried it hands-on.

The transition was quite smooth, take it from someone who has used and relied on MSOffice the entire time. Though one thing we did notice about most of the people who use MSOffice is that they use it on their machines and not the cloud versions. For the collaboration part, they use a different platform like Google Docs, for example.

This gap widens, even more, when it comes to sharing. Addressing these problems that we face of creation, collaboration, and other 360 degrees of document adventures, we introduce you to the all-new ONLYOFFICE.

So meet ONLYOFFICE. It is a friendly-looking cloud-based document editor. In this segment, we will be reviewing it thoroughly. So let’s get right into it.

First Impressions, User Interface and Overview of ONLYOFFICE

ONLYOFFICE provides you with a robust online document editor. Apart from these, they offer four more variants that focus on the business aspect of the document world. As in, they offer Cloud Service, an enterprise Edition, Integration Edition, and a developers edition. We will get into these details later, for now, let’s check out the product.

Getting Started with ONLYOFFICE

Getting started with ONLYOFFICE is straight-forward. All you need to do is signup for free on their official website, and you will be logged in directly. Make sure to choose the account name wisely as it will be assigned to you as your personal cloud space, followed by .onlyoffice.sg domain. You get the domain (.eu, .sg, or .com) depending on your region. It assures more speed as you get the servers that are closest to your location.

As you start the ONLYOFFICE, You get to choose between Documents, CRM, People, Mail, Projects, and Community. After selecting the Document, you can choose to create or open a document, presentation, or spreadsheet. The GUI you get is pretty simple and has tabs that help you switch from one document from another reasonably quick.

Document

Its user interface resembles that of MSOffice, and Google Docs from the inside, the toolbar, the text area, and everything else is placed in a clean and accessible way. All the handy tools that you use daily stays right in front of you. Beware that you cannot open any other document from the usual file menu, once you are in any document. That might break the workflow, but you can go back and open anything.

You can seamlessly add content, including images, edit the complete look as per your requirement. A handy and notable feature is to grab images from the web rather than having it first in your local machine. Also, directly copying any image and pasting works just fine.

Furthermore, it allows you to open documents without any distortion and also lets you change specific texts in paragraphs – like targeting some lines and changing its properties such as line height, spacing, and all other formattings.

So far, so good, let’s take a look at the spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets

Most of the business relies on spreadsheets. It contains all the advanced features that you need and allows you to create different types of charts and helps you represent everything in a more appealing manner. Overall you get the same feel of using other spreadsheet apps but with a lot more customizable options.

You might take a while to figure out how everything would work, as in editing and providing a custom look and feel to the charts, nothing that you can’t manage.

Presentations

Everyone makes presentations now and then, in client meetings, to showcase an idea, all of that, and other things that you can think of need a presentation to convey. Herewith Onlyoffice, you get to create seamless and beautiful presentations reasonably quick.

You get all the standard options such as animations, themes, shapes, and layouts to sort things for you. It might get a bit confusing while editing a shape as you need to turn the edit option on every time you want to, but it is manageable.

Features and Advantages of ONLYOFFICE

Why even switch to ONLYOFFICE? Well, to answer this question, let’s have a look at the features that it has to offer. Then it would be easy to determine who’s the winner.

Robust Online Documents Editor

Before you say its also available in MSOffice Online and in Google Docs, they both lag behind when it comes to editing documents and features that you get with it. In ONLYOFFICE, you can have auto shapes and even edit them at ease.

With MSOffice, it is just a solid shape; there’s not much that can be one with that. While on the other hand, in Google Docs, you get auto shapes opening up in an image editor, which is pretty much useless given that you cannot actually see the changes and understand how your page looks in real-time while you edit the shape.

Among other things, MSOffice online does not support charts, columns, equations, creating own styles, section breaks, creation of table contents, and bookmarks. It’s high time you dump that and switch to ONLYOFFICE.

Compatible with Microsoft Office formats

It is 100% compatible with all the Microsoft Office formats. You will get similar results even with complex files. 99% of the time, everything will look the same; there might be a possibility where something could be disoriented. Though no one has seen such a thing, and if you do, then their excellent support will figure it out and give you a solution on how you can proceed further.

Powerful Collaboration

When it comes to collaboration and maintaining the documents, ONLYOFFICE lets keep track of versions more efficiently. You get a separate menu for collaboration. Here you can keep track of changes, accept or reject a change, comment, and review the overall document. Giving you one more reason to switch: MSOffice doesn’t allow you to review.

Other than this, you can impose sharing rights in multiple ways. There’s also a dual co-editing mode giving edit rights on character and paragraph level. You can also provide limited access to review, edit, and comment. Some parts of the documents can be protected from editing.

Taking work efficiency to a whole new level, you get to chat with your peers in real-time. You can guide anyone straight-away on changes, editing, and whatever else you can think of with the chat feature.

Projects, CRM, Calendar, Mail and Document Management

You can also create projects and plan the work by prioritizing tasks and even set deadlines. In the end, it also lets you analyze the progress and gives you actionable insights on workflow management. There’s also a CRM where you can handle all the leads that you generate for your business. Report generation and progress tracking are also available.

In Mail, you can connect it with any business or commercial accounts and stay organized by tagging the messages, fetching conversations and files. This helps you maintain the overall efficiency. Under document management, you can keep everything organized in a structured manner. Here, it is possible to give limited and complete access to other people for viewing, editing, and other collaborations.

Managing time efficiently is key to productivity. You can create a timetable for teams and individuals so that everyone stays on their track and never misses a deadline.

More Secure

Microsoft does provide encryption and other security features but only for the business version of its product. Rest, everything remains dicy. Going even deep in this topic, they even reserve the right to check on your documents also if they are in a private folder.

While with OlyOffie, all the users, regardless of what plan they opt-in, get everything stored in a secure 256-bit AES encryption storage, and secure data transfer is considered a primary feature. You can also enable two-factor authentication.

Cloud Service

Here, the complete suite is provided online for you to create, edit, and collaborate with your peers via the cloud infrastructure that ONLYOFFICE has in its arsenal. You can get started with a 180 days free trial and check out how it works and get used to it. After that, you can choose to subscribe as per your usage.

If you are looking for a more robust online solution, then ONLYOFFICE can also provide you with a private web office that runs on a private web server under its Enterprise Edition plan. Under this plan, you can create a separate workspace for a different branch of your department. Additionally, you can even rebrand your workspace to reflect your company’s ideology.

Pricing is quite flexible and will only charge on how much you intend to use. Apart from this, it is free for Non-profit organizations and primary education institutes. For higher education, they provide a flat 50% discount. Furthermore, it is free for personal usage. So just sign up and start using the cloud version of ONLYOFFICE.

Integration Edition

ONLYOFFICE also offers an on-premise solution. Basically, here, the complete suite will be hosted on a private server at your own company or on a private cloud that you own. In a way, it is to integrate the online document editor into your existing environment that is hosted on NextCloud, OwnCloud, Seafile, and other storage platforms. You get pre-built binaries, Docker image, Docker Script, Virtual appliance, Amazon machine image, etc. that make installation a piece of cake.

You can use all the functionalities, and it becomes even more robust in terms of security and privacy. It is easy to install and integrate as every configuration is already made, and all you need to do is import it.

This version is best suited for businesses and other agencies with more than 50 users.

Final verdict:

ONLYOFFICE is a reliable and robust solution to create, edit, and collaborate the documents online as well as offline. It offers completeness in itself by handing out more advanced features that other providers miss.

Do give it a shot, for personal usage, it is entirely free. Moreover, if you have a Linux operating system, then by switching to ONLYOFFICE, you will do yourself a big favour. Do let us know how you feel about OpenOffice in the comments section below.