|
|
NeoOffice Mobile
From NeoWiki
After many months of work, our newest product - NeoOffice Mobile - will be released on 15 September 2009.
NeoOffice Mobile provides a way to securely share NeoOffice files with other users and other computers. It works by allowing you to "publish" a document from within NeoOffice 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, previously published documents can be opened directly in NeoOffice.
In addition, NeoOffice Mobile was designed with the following three goals in mind that we hope NeoOffice users will find useful (please scroll to the bottom of this page for more details about each of these goals):
- Mobile phone support
- Tight integration with NeoOffice
- Security and high availability
Features for NeoOffice donors
Our plan is to give any NeoOffice user a free NeoOffice Mobile account. Free accounts will be able to upload and view documents but they will be limited to only 2 megabytes of storage and their documents will expire after 48 hours. This will allow users to try out NeoOffice Mobile and use it for temporary storage.
NeoOffice donors, in contrast, will be given access to the complete set of features. The NeoOffice project is funded entirely by donations from our users. Since over half of our donations come from a small percentage of our users, we provide the following NeoOffice Mobile extra features as a thank you to our most generous users.
Users that have donate US$10 (or €8 or £6 or CA$12 or AU$13) or more within the last year get the following features:
- Previous version of each document can be viewed - With this feature, users will be able to view two versions of each document: the latest uploaded version and the previous version that was uploaded before the latest uploaded version. In essence, this feature preserves a backup copy whenever a user overwrites an existing NeoOffice Mobile document.
- Recently expired documents are automatically restored - With this feature, users with free accounts or users who have not donated recently can restore any documents that have expired within the last few months simply by making a NeoOffice donation of US$10 or more.
- Document expiration dates are automatically extended based on amount donated< - After making any donation of US$10 or more, the expiration date for any restored or new documents will be reset to one month from the donation date. With this feature and the restoring of recently expired documents feature, users with more than US$10 in total donations over the last year or users that periodically donate the minimum amount can ensure that their documents never expire.
- Significantly higher storage limit - Users that have US$10 or more in unused donations can store up to 100 megabytes of documents in their NeoOffice Mobile account.
Screen snapshots
Screen snapshots of viewing a NeoOffice Mobile document on an iPhone and running NeoOffice Mobile within NeoOffice are shown below:
 |
 |
 |
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.
Special thanks go to Ed and Tim for generously donating hundreds of hours of their time to write the NeoOffice Mobile code. Without their donated time, creating the new features that NeoOffice Mobile provides would not have been possible.
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
We wanted to make publishing a document in NeoOffice Mobile as simple as possible so we 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 us so 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 encrypted and duplicated on multiple machines in different data centers to ensure that if one of our servers goes down, users can still access NeoOffice Mobile.
