Collabora Productivity awarded Best UK Open Source Organisation

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Collabora Productivity has been named Best Organisation at the UK Open Source Awards 2015. The award, presented By Software Freedom Conservancy Executive Director Karen Sandler on Wednesday in Edinburgh, was made for ground-breaking work on LibreOffice in 2014.

“This is a time of unprecedented change for British Open Source companies, and growth that’s long overdue” said Collabora Vice President Michael Meeks in his acceptance speech. “The productivity space in particular is due for a shake up, and Open Source will provide it”.

Collabora was chosen over three other shortlisted entrants. These included IMS MAXIMS, a comprehensive Electronic Health Record system used extensively by the NHS, and non-profit Open Source startup Matrix, a recent competitor to Google’s WebRTC. Organisers announced a record number of candidates this year, with a 40% increase on 2014.

“Recent Government policy changes are stimulating demand for Open Source services and development” said Greg Soper, Event Manager of the Open Source Awards. “Global trends towards service-based business models, combined with increasing pressure for value returns, are providing unparalleled opportunities for Britain’s Open Source businesses”.

Via its flagship product, LibreOffice-From-Collabora, the company last year extended LibreOffice support for Microsoft OOXML format, bringing crucial interoperability improvements; added support for legally valid digital signatures to PDF documents, and introduced OpenCL computation, resulting in hardware acceleration and a major performance boost on modern devices. Engineers also did extensive work on LibreOffice for Android, releasing the first in a series of products, LibreOffice Viewer for Android, early this year.

About Collabora Productivity:
Collabora Productivity delivers LibreOffice products and consulting to the enterprise. With the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice code base and community. LibreOffice-from-Collabora provides a business-hardened office suite with long term multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora Ltd., the global software consultancy specializing in providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specialising in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries, counting Samsung, Intel, and Google among its former clients.

Latest LibreOffice Viewer for Android brings faster, smoother reading

Collabora’s LibreOffice Viewer for Android brings a major performance update in today’s release.

As part of our ongoing development of the separate LibreOffice editor app, user interface rendering has been overhauled ‘under the hood’, with the focus on faster and more accurate fetching of tiles (images which combine to form the visible Android interface).

Where scrolling complex documents used to lag, browsing is now smooth. Where occasional waiting for document sections was required, tiling now prioritises the most important sections, and renders them faster.

This work by Collabora Engineer Tomaž Vajngerl is critical for responsive editing in the LibreOffice editor project, which shares the same codebase as the Viewer application.

Today’s update is the latest of Collabora’s weekly Android updates.

ODF for cloud communication added to Government catalogue

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Collabora is making it easier for the UK Public Sector to comply with Governmental Open Document Format (ODF) policy by offering interoperability services through the G-Cloud6 digital marketplace. Public bodies may now directly commission Open Standards-based solutions to incompatible proprietary formats, and gain expert assistance bridging barriers to legacy back office systems as they move documents to and from Cloud based services.

The Open Document Format (ODF) is a vital interchange format for moving documents between Cloud Services. Many Cloud-based office suites appear to have no native file format, as all data is stored remotely, accessed only via a web interface — the software implementation is concealed to end-users. Performing data-migration into and between Cloud services demands detailed understanding of import / export systems and format compatibility. Transfer between incompatible systems necessitates a data medium that includes all of a document’s rich content and formatting. As the most widely accepted Open Standard in the field, ODF is ideally suited to this task.

Open Standards are essential for interoperability and freedom of choice based on the merits of different software products and services. British procurement policy mandates the use of Open Standards to realise independence and cost efficiency and vendor independence.

Increasingly popular mobile and web-based apps have greatly expanded the options available public sector buyers. Compatibility remains a crucial necessity when deploying new and disparate systems. ODF offers sophisticated capabilities together with maximum industry uptake and support. A variety of products from competing vendors provide ODF implementations across all major mobile, workstation, and server platforms.

As contributors to the ODF standard and experts on its implementation, Collabora is delighted to have been accepted to the GCloud programme.

Team blog: Stabilising LibreOffice Viewer for Android

By Jan “Kendy” Holešovský: At the end of the last week we released the new version of LibreOffice Viewer for Android, and I must say, it is a pretty solid release. The app is still in Beta, and some problems (like occasional crashes) should be anticipated, but overall there have been so many stability improvements that I am confident that it’s now very usable for daily work…

Read the rest of this post on Jan’s blog