March 2018 - Collabora Office and Collabora Online

CiviHosting to offer Collabora Online as a service

22 March 201822 March 2018 Cor Nouws Leave a comment

Cambridge, United Kingdom – March 22, 2018 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, and CiviHosting, an established full-service hosting firm based in the USA with a strong focus on security, are proud to announce a partnership to offer Collabora Online.

Collabora Online is a powerful LibreOffice-based online office suite with excellent support for all major office file formats, and includes key features such as collaborative editing, Long Term Support and signed security updates. With Collabora Online, SLA Documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be edited right from the web browser, with no need to download any add-on or plugin.

“Collabora is delighted to partner with CiviHosting” said Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. “We are excited about their focus on customer satisfaction, and look forward to integrate Collabora Online into their cloud service.”

“Collabora has done impressive work developing Collabora Online” said David Feldman, Communications Manager of CiviHosting. “It’s exactly what our customers need: a powerful online office suite that allows them to access and edit their office files, while respecting their privacy.”

For more information, please mail to sales@civihosting.com or sales@collaboraoffice.com.

About Collabora Productivity:
Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specialising in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

About CiviHosting:
CiviHosting is an established, full-service hosting firm based in the USA with a strong focus on security. With shared, VPS and dedicated server solutions in both Europe and the US, CiviHosting provides services to a wide range of clients from small businesses to large Universities. Their hosting includes daily backups and a 24/7 Support Team. For more details about their Collabora Online hosting services, visit: https://civihosting.com/collabora-online-hosting/

ETES now offers Collabora Online as a service

15 March 201820 March 2018 Cor Nouws Leave a comment

Cambridge, United Kingdom – March 6, 2018 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, and ETES, an IT system house based in Stuttgart with a focus on Linux and Open Source, are proud to announce a partnership to offer Collabora Online.

ETES will offer Collabora Online, integrated in Nextcloud, as a service, hosted on a secure German data center. This will allow enterprises and organizations to securely run their own online office suite, allowing them to keep in control of their own data, while increasing productivity.

Collabora Online includes collaborative editing, excellent support for all popular office file formats, Long Term Support, signed security updates and a SLA.

“We are looking forward to working together with ETES” said Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. “ETES’ experience with Open Source technologies in Germany will be valuable asset for enterprises and organizations that seek to deploy their own Open Source office in the cloud with the latest version of Collabora Online.”

“Collabora Productivity offers exactly what our enterprise customers need” said Markus Espenhain, CEO at ETES. “Their desktop office suite provides our clients with an Open Source office suite with Long Term Support, security updates and more, while Collabora Online enables them to collaborate in the Cloud on their own terms.”

For more information, please mail to sales@etes.de or sales@collaboraoffice.com.

About ETES:
ETES GmbH specialized on Linux and Open Source, based in Stuttgart, is providing a full range of IT services such as consulting, implementation, maintenance and support. Over the past 10 years the company has become an expert in delivering cloud services. ETES has invested in a certified data center in 2017 to be able to offer the most effective service for the customers. The servers are hosted in Germany which guarantees industry standards concerning security (aligned to ISO 27001). For more information, visit www.etes.de/startseite/.

Recent Mac-specific fixes in LibreOffice

13 March 201814 March 2018 Cor Nouws Leave a comment

Over the past months, we have been able to make some resources available to look into the most urgent Mac-specific bugs in LibreOffice, thanks to people purchasing LibreOffice Vanilla on the Mac App Store.

We addressed all the high priority Mac regressions

A few bugs were related to use of various 3rd-party fonts on macOS. The system APIs used by LibreOffice to enumerate installed typefaces and their styles indicate the weight of the font as a floating-point number between -1.0 and 1.0, with zero being “regular” weight. That number needs to be converted to an integer (with just ten separate values) used in LibreOffice. The mapping is heuristic, and it turned out that tweaking the mapping just a little bit made it possible to distinguish between some weights of a typeface that had previously mapped to the same weight in LibreOffice.

Another issue was that for some other 3rd-party fonts, the system API claimed that the weight of the “Regular” style was non-zero and positive (0.23 to be exact), i.e., a bit on the bold side. LibreOffice trusted that, which lead to the bold style always being selected for those typefaces, even when asking for a non-bold, regular (medium) weight. The fix for this was to simply handle these special cases separately. If resources allow and more similar problematic fonts are identified, some more generic fix would be needed.

Another set of bugs were related to notifications for screen parameter changes (like when changing the size of the Dock, or attaching or detaching monitors). On some Macs, the system sent these notifications quite eagerly for no obvious reason. LibreOffice was asking to receive such notifications too early before it was prepared to handle them. This lead to a crash. The fix was to request notifications only once being prepared to receive them.

Also, the handler for this notification did not check whether anything had actually changed that LibreOffice would want to know but just went through all the motions of re-calculating layouts of GUI and sizes of text and whatnot, totally in vain. This took a considerable amount of time when you had a lot of document windows open and several of these notifications were received. The fix here was to add a check if anything actually had changed that would be of interest to LibreOffice, and if not, just don’t proceed to do any re-calculations of layouts etc.

Finally, there was a problem with inserting videos in Impress presentations. When doing that LibreOffice (for some reason) copies the video file first into a temporary copy. That copy was given a name without file name extension. The system APIs used to open and display the video did not like that and displaying even an initial grabbed frame from the video failed. The fix was simply to make sure the copy of the video file had the same file name extension as the original one.

We’ll be addressing more Mac issues as when as we sell more LibreOffice Vanilla. Why not get involved to ensure they’re well triaged and prioritized!

Read more details how Collabora started maintaining LibreOffice Vanilla in the Mac app store.

Download now!

Collabora Online 3.1 released

2 March 20186 March 2018 Cor Nouws Leave a comment

Cambridge, United Kingdom – March 2, 2018 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, is proud to announce a new release of its flagship enterprise-ready cloud document suite – Collabora Online 3.1, including new features and improvements. This is the first release after the major Collabora Online 3.0 release a few weeks ago.