Security and future availability

peregrinustyss · November 13, 2015

I just suggested Zotero as an alternative (to Endnote) in my medium-sized company and there are some questions.

Security – being confronted with privacy concerns already discussed here (I would welcome a client-side encryption!), one question addresses the "cite while you write" feature in MS Word. While inserting a citation in Word, is there any server contact if you are working in a syncronized/group library? In other words: can any content of our Word documents be transfered or read by your servers (because of the interaction)?

Future availabilty – regarding the developments of Mozilla/Firefox (mentioned here in the forums as well): what about the future of Zotero? Is it "guaranteed" that it will be developed/supported in the next couple of years?

Thanks for any hints.

adamsmith · November 13, 2015

Security -- no, word processor integration runs entirely through local ports, there is zero contact with servers. The only thing the servers ever see is files&date you store in Zotero. (and, to be precise, anonymous error reports from translators, though you can disable that).

Sustainability -- my understanding is that Zotero is on very stable financial footing through its revenue, a high priority within CHNM, and hiring/have just hired new developers and is actively working to adapt to the changes of the mozilla platform. There are now sufficiently powerful cross-platform environments that Zotero is viable entirely without Firefox (i.e. only with a connector add-on like we have for Chrome), so Zotero will be long-term sustainable regardless of the exact nature of the mozilla changes, and I have very little doubt that it'll be around and going strong in 5 years.

peregrinustyss · November 16, 2015

Thanks for the reply. Regarding the last point, the future availability/plans, I have another question.

You (adamsmith) hinted in another thread that the sync with more than 50000 entries won't be a problem in future (as it seems to be now):

Ab ca. 50tausend wird der sync mit Zotero problematisch (wobei das mittelfristig kein Problem mehr sein wird).

What are the plans that will solve this problem? And is it really unstable at the moment? We want to put several shared groups into one admin account, and this account could reach more than 50000 entries over time. Could it be a problem?

adamsmith · November 16, 2015

Zotero is currently revamping how syncing works. The new version will sync through the API (i.e. the same way e.g. the website view is generated), which means essentially one item at a time. As a consequence, even if your sync gets interrupted, it's incremental: so the next time you try, you start out where you left. You also aren't faced with the large up/downloads for initial syncs that currently will occasionally stall on the server. No ETA on this, but we're hoping for soon.

How unstable this is currently depends on the number of items. If you're around 50k total number of items (i.e. including notes and attachments), this will still work fine most of the time, so you may just have to deal with occasional failed syncs and retry. As that number goes over 100k, it probably won't be a good experience with the current sync.