Office suites have stood out among other software because of how well they have adapted to the benefits of the cloud. Today users have a variety of very polished services at an unbeatable cost, but anyone wanting an open variant knows that the cloud in general is not a good place to look. That said, let's make room for Open365, a new platform based on LibreOffice Online that lets us create and sync documents across all our devices very easily.
For better or worse, "the cloud" already occupies a fundamental place in our lives, and although we could live without it (we did for decades), the transition would be quite complicated. This is especially true in high-productivity environments, with documents or spreadsheets modified collaboratively, and thousands of texts saved online. The main market options are two: Office 365, definitive favorite of the corporate world, and Google Docs, which many individual users (including yours truly) have managed to squeeze beyond its natural limitations. Now, what about open source? In its own way, both Office 365 and Google Docs are "glass prisons", and although users can transfer their data to another service without much trouble, they have no control over how the applications themselves work.
That is when Open365 appears. After creating an account and logging into the service, users receive a total of 20 gigabytes of online storage for all their projects, download links compatible with Windows, OS X, Linux, Android (iOS is on the way), and access to the "Hub", whose interface reminds us a lot of Google Drive. Format support is quite broad in Open365, and by no means limited to documents, spreadsheets, or slides. The software offers an image viewer and even a multimedia player, while content can be organized into personal "folders" or "libraries", ready to be shared and synced with appropriate permissions. When it comes to running its applications, Open365's experience is in line with what we already know from LibreOffice Online.
Personally, I would have loved to do a deeper analysis of Open365, but apparently its media exposure has put the servers under a lot of pressure. In other words, I've been waiting for Writer to open for ten minutes in two different browsers, with no result. Obviously, all these technical details will be resolved as the platform advances in development, but the true potential lies not so much in positioning itself as a competitor to Office 365 or Google Docs, but in the possibility of "self-hosting" that users will have in the future, creating and maintaining their own servers. One of the big prices to pay for using the cloud is giving up direct control over our information, and Open365 will try to change that.
