Bug 157921

Summary: Collaboration feature missing in Libreoffice: offline enhancement suggestion with user registration and peer to peer document updates
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Daniele <grassode>
Component: LibreOfficeAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: enhancement CC: stephane.guillou
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.5.7.1 release   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:

Description Daniele 2023-10-25 14:17:38 UTC 
Description:
Presently one mayor drawback in working with LO in teams is a collaboration feature. Other projects have tried filling this gap with online solutions.
Unfortunately, they all fall behind what could allow LO making a breakthrough in this area and be adopted by the thousands of users who are struggling with other tools, being they paid, free, or opensource.

What I am suggesting is focusing on offline collaboration without having to make a change to the bulk of Libreoffice project.

Not being a programmer, I will just suggest what I see in the steps below.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Probably a flat file format is necessary for this
2. Secondly, also a user registration in LO
3. Thirdly, files would have to run in a service which would come packaged within LO, such as Syncthing or similar (peer to peer)
4. Changes made to documents by several could be handled in the way anytype.io (an offline collaboration project, or a similar one) is doing.

Actual Results:
Presently such a collaboration is not possible.

Expected Results:
I expect this solution to deliver a collaboration software while keeping the richness and speed of the present Libreoffice product.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:
Version: 7.5.7.1 (AARCH64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 47eb0cf7efbacdee9b19ae25d6752381ede23126
CPU threads: 8; OS: Mac OS X 14.0; UI render: default; VCL: osx
Locale: en-US (en.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded
Comment 1 Stéphane Guillou (stragu) 2023-10-26 21:21:26 UTC 
See the following relevant reports:
- Bug 88127 - [RFE] Ability to collaborate on documents over GIT
. Bug 85660 - FILESAVE: Improve source control compatibility of flat ODF files
- Bug 97282 - Enhanced Change Tracking/collaboration proposal - immutable XML
- Bug 133984 - Enhancement: Support for real-time and offline collaborative editing in LibreOffice (desktop)

Maybe your request is already covered by some / all of them? Please see the discussions there.
Comment 2 Daniele 2023-10-27 06:49:06 UTC 
Hi Stephane,

thank you for the research.

Out of the 4 reports you provided, the last one (Bug 133984) is indeed a thorough exchange on this topic.

The other either focus on git with not so user-friendly solutions for common users (Bug 88127 and Bug 85660) or propose a specific solution (Bug 97282) which may or may not be part of the final one.

However, some elements are missing from Bug 133984 too, that is a practical solution which could build on already successful offline collaboration opensource projects such as anytype.io.

Since the gist of what I am proposing is practically the same as Bug 133984, is there a way to link that report to this or, is it best to make a comment to that report?
Comment 3 Stéphane Guillou (stragu) 2023-10-27 13:38:02 UTC 
Thank you for the reply, Daniele.
I would suggest commenting in bug 133984 with your ideas, to centralise the conversation.
As you agree the request is essentially the same, I am marking this bug as a duplicate of bug 133984 (which gives weight to the feature request).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 133984 ***
Comment 4 Daniele 2023-10-27 13:53:00 UTC 
Great, just done what you suggested.