[Qgis-psc] On using Nextcloud for editing documents

[Tim Sutton]

Hi

> On 12 Apr 2020, at 09:39, Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I tested editing the "environmental policy" draft on Nextcloud in order to get a better feeling about the usability. I think functionality wise it would probably ok for our needs, but the lagging is really, really disturbing and I agree with Tim that hurts productivity substantially.
> 
> I wonder what the reason is and if we could do something to improve it?
> 
> As I understand it, all of the OSGEO servers are located in the US. I wonder if this is the reason for the annoying lags. As far as I know all major internet companies try to have their infrastructure as close as possible to their customers, when latency is an issue. When it comes to collaborative editing, keeping the latency and lagging as small as possible is important for the usability. Having our Nextcloud server based in the US when all of the PSC members are currently based in Europe doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
> 
> I wonder if it would help to have a Nextcloud instance somewhere in Germany or Middle-Europe? But then again, someone would have to maintain a piece of infrastructure ... something we would like to avoid.
> 
> I believe I saw a hosted Nextcloud service at Hetzner, an option we could rent, but not having to maintain it ourselves - but I can't find it. Maybe I was wrong or they retracted it?


We use Hetzner for our company servers, I don’t recall seeing an option for NextCloud hosting. But we have been running a NextCloud instance in my company for a while, though we haven’t upgraded to the new version that includes the collaborative editing tools. BTW we don’t use it in production because of various issues with it.

@dimas would you mind upgrading quickly then I can let Andreas test it?


> 
> Maybe someone knows a good managed Nextcloud service in Europe that we could try if it makes any difference? Because in the current state I don't think I would be happy to use it for the QGIS.ORG PSC documents.


And even assuming that NextCloud collaborative document editing work well if the hosting is more local, there should be a detailed plan put forward about how we will migrate content off Google Docs - who will do it, who will updating references to google doc hosted content on our wiki, web site etc. There are lots of other things like google forms, document history etc. that need to be thought o,f and should all be migrated (or an explicit plan put in place if we plan not to migrate them).


Sidenote: The Collabora office LTS strategy is interesting:


LTS support

We offer LTS support for 3 years as standard, with up to 5 years if required. Incremental updates via MSP installers and software repositories. No installation or redeployment required.
Centralised deploy management

ADMX templates <https://www.collaboraoffice.com/windows-group-policy-admx/> provide control over 10.000 settings from a single interface, including security & localisation.
Up to date

Major new releases once a year with fresh features and improvements, tested, packaged and ready for deployment















Sidenote 2: I remember some discussion of limitations in their  (Collabora Office - the thing we are testing in NextCloud) licensing on the Linux Action News podcast I subscribe to a few months back (https://linuxactionnews.com/141). Something about limiting the number of users before you need to use the commercial version. Someone needs to dig in and check that (I’m also not sure of the link between OnlyOffice and Collabora office).	

"ONLYOFFICE’s community edition is installed by default on a new Nextcloud installation. For users who already run Nextcloud, installing it requires just one click – like all Nextcloud apps! No need for docker containers, web server configuration or other complications.”

You can see the limitations of the community edition: https://www.onlyoffice.com/compare-server-editions.aspx 





Regards

Tim

> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Andreas
> 
> 
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—










Tim Sutton

Co-founder: Kartoza
Ex Project chair: QGIS.org

Visit http://kartoza.com <http://kartoza.com/> to find out about open source:

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Skype: timlinux 
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