NeoOffice Mobile

From NeoWiki

After many months of work, our newest product - NeoOffice Mobile - is now ready for testing. Although NeoOffice Mobile is definitely not totally complete, we would like to let any interested NeoOffice users see this new product and help us find any major problems or critical bugs. So, we have released NeoOffice Mobile Preview.

Because this is a Preview release, please be aware that files will likely be deleted from the NeoOffice Mobile servers every week or so. Also, if a bug fix or feature change requires it, the files may be deleted sooner. So please do not use NeoOffice Mobile as a backup server and save any files that you have published in NeoOffice Mobile on your machine.

History

At our NeoOffice event in Milan in June 2008, Patrick and Ed talked about an idea called NeoOffice Mobile. The thought behind NeoOffice Mobile was to provide a way for NeoOffice users to securely publish documents from within NeoOffice and allow only the users that they trust the ability to view the document from any web browser or mobile phone. They got a lot of feedback from discussions at the Milan event and from these discussions they started to form a coherent product design. Unfortunately, they were not able to start implementation of their product design because Patrick has been inundated with all of the ongoing NeoOffice development and support work and neither of them are experts in building large web applications.

Towards the end of last year Ed was discussing the idea with one of his friends. Tim is a software engineer who has lots of expertise in designing and implementing large web applications. Tim gave him some great advice and seemed interested in the NeoOffice Mobile idea and its potential. Since then, Tim helped Ed implement a working NeoOffice Mobile prototype.

Features

The primary focus of Tim and Ed's work thus far has been to develop a way to securely share NeoOffice files with other users and other computers. The concept is that you can "publish" a document from within NeoOffice. It then gets uploaded to the NeoOffice Mobile server using a secure, encrypted connection. Once documents are published, they can be viewed using secure connections from regular web browsers or web-enabled mobile devices. Also, for NeoOffice users with NeoOffice Mobile installed, document in NeoMobile will be opened directly in NeoOffice.

All published documents in NeoOffice Mobile are private unless you explicitly share them with other users. Also, any documents that you share can be set to be viewable only by the users that you specify. For example, you can limit viewing of some documents to only your colleagues or friends.

As Tim and Ed were working on NeoOffice Mobile, they focused on three things that they hope NeoOffice users will find useful:

• Mobile phone support - Since the primary function of NeoOffice Mobile is to allow you to share documents with other people your document is stored in HTML format so that any web browser can display your document even if your web browser is on a mobile phone with a 200 x 200 pixel screen. Since some mobile phones like Apple's iPhone support PDF, your document is also stored in PDF format so that users can view an identical copy of your document if they want to.

• Tight integration with NeoOffice - Tim and Ed wanted to make the task of publishing a document in NeoOffice Mobile as simple as possible. They made NeoOffice Mobile accessible from a floating window within NeoOffice. Once you are logged into your NeoOffice Mobile account, you can publish the current active document directly from the Save button in the NeoOffice Mobile floating window and the NeoOffice Mobile code will upload copies of your document to the NeoOffice Mobile servers in HTML, PDF, and ODF formats.

• Security and high availability - Data security has always been important to Tim and Ed so they made all network communications use full SSL encryption (SSL encryption is the mechanism used for HTTPS web pages). Also, by default, any documents that users publish in NeoOffice Mobile are not viewable by any other users unless the user explicitly shares the document. Lastly, all NeoOffice Mobile data is duplicated on multiple machines in different data centers to ensure that if one of our servers goes down, users can still access NeoOffice Mobile.