The Institute of Biology of Lille has implemented ONLYOFFICE within its research units to facilitate workflow. This use case was presented at the Paris Open Source Summit. If you missed it, find all the details below.

About the IBL

The Institute of Biology of Lille was founded in 1996 on the campus of the Pasteur Institute of Lille to increase the capacity for cancer research and basic studies focused on infection biology, the genetics of diabetes and obesity.

This building now houses two joint scientific facilities and a multi-support unit, a startup and 17 research teams with a total of 260 employees. The IBL has its own IT Resource Center which manages all software and hardware assets to ensure the efficient performance of labs and platforms.

Goals to achieve

In the day-to-day running of the institute, the employees create a multitude of office documents and need to:

share these documents securely and easily to avoid having multiple copies on different computers;
control access to the files;
collaborate on documents with researchers, manufacturers, institutions;
keep full control over stored and shared files and regularly perform data backups;
access the editing tools from anywhere and with any operating system.

What’s more, project management tools would be of great help in monitoring the progress and a balanced division of tasks.

Why ONLYOFFICE?

The IBL has put aside all the services that remain partitioned to the local network and require a particular configuration on computers. Apart from that, there are well-known office suites (Microsoft Office Online, Google Suite, Zoho, Thinkfree Office) that are not available as self-hosted solutions and don’t provide full control over data.

Among the remaining solutions, ONLYOFFICE is the most comprehensive because it includes all-in-one document management, real-time editing and co-editing, and productivity tracking tools. Thanks to OOXML formats taken as a core for the suite, ONLYOFFICE ensures the best compatibility with the Microsoft Office files that the researchers use and share with partners daily. The choice of the IBL is obvious!

A year with ONLYOFFICE

Jeremy Maton, System and Network Administrator at the IBL:

After one year of trying ONLYOFFICE, our feedback is very positive. The suite has become a basic instrument that we all use every day. The portal allows organizing and storing all our files and folders in a single and secure place. The abundance of editing features and their ease of use have been warmly welcomed by my colleagues. Elasticsearch, a powerful search engine, provides quick access to the needed information. As said by the administration, ONLYOFFICE makes our teams more productive, more efficient, and even more innovative.

During the presentation at JRES 2019, Jeremy Maton highlighted that his colleagues also appreciate the instant messaging and project management tools that allow them not only to set up goals and benchmark the progress but also to attach the documents to the tasks and edit them within the Projects module. For more information, watch the full video in French “How to boost your team’s productivity using ONLYOFFICE”.

To have professional support and access the advanced administrative tools, the IT Resource Center of the IBL has recently migrated to ONLYOFFICE Enterprise Edition. This solution is being gradually implemented in all the laboratories and platforms hosted by the IBL.

New challenges

ONLYOFFICE helps the IBL to tackle the emerging challenges:

Migration from G Suite. Members of the newly-arrived financial management team were creating, editing, and co-editing orders for equipment using G Suite. Now, IT staff is migrating content from Google Sheets into ONLYOFFICE to ensure data confidentiality and provide instant access to these files for all employees without having a Google account.
Collaboration with external teams. External research teams need to have space to store, share and collaborate on office documents. As Jeremy Maton said, the most effective solution to the emerging problem is ONLYOFFICE Document Server connected to Nextcloud.

Solutions guide

Did the success story of the IBL convince you to join 5 million users?

If you are looking for a full-stack online office suite, try ONLYOFFICE Enterprise Edition which offers powerful online document editors and a groupware platform.

If you are looking for advanced document processing within the cloud platform of your choice like Nextcloud, ownCloud, Pydio, XWiki, Jalios, exoPlatform, Seafile, PowerFolder, Alfresco, SharePoint, try ONLYOFFICE Integration Edition.

If you didn’t find the integration app for your web service, develop your own connector using API offered by ONLYOFFICE and extend your web solution functionality wit ONLYOFFICE online editors.

Download success story in PDF version.

Find here more client stories or share your experience in the comments below or write to us at press@onlyoffice.com

How ONLYOFFICE helps organize research workflow in the Institute of Biology of Lille

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