Collabora Online 3.2 released

Cambridge, United Kingdom – April 19, 2018 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, is excited to announce a new release of its flagship enterprise-ready cloud document suite – Collabora Online 3.2, with new features and multiple improvements.

What’s new in Collabora Online 3.2?

Our minor point revisions are shipped approximately each month, and typically include security and other bug fixes, but we also like to include some critical features and improvements when they bring a low risk to our customers we highlight a few of these below.

Implemented Chart creation

While it was always possible to render and edit existing charts; now it is possible to create and insert charts not only in Calc, but also in Writer and Impress.

Data Validation in Calc

Many of our customers and partners have requested the ability to use data-validation, which is frequently used to allow spreadsheets to be used as check-lists, or to constrain how forms are filled in, letting users select from a pre-canned list of valid options for various cells and fields. While we allowed users to configure and create such list validation options in 3.1, in 3.2 we bring popups to allow them to be used fluidly and collaboratively. Uses cases include engineers doing final assembly inspection on their tablets, collaborating with others to ensure a complete product passes all available tests.

Context menu spell checking

Although we have had multi-language spell-checking via red-underlines from our early days, and in 3.0 we added a complete spell checking dialog for whole documents – we have taken time to expose the frequently requested – right-click context menu option for rapidly correcting individual words into 3.2.

Column Formatting

Formatting columns have been available as part of our page style dialog for a while, but users could find this hard to find. To help people find that we exposed the Format → Columns dialog.

Various fixes and improvements

  • Writer
    • Avoiding cursor jumping when another user moves their view.
  • Calc
    • F2 – triggers cell edit mode in Chrome;
    • Improved positioning of auto-filter pop-ups;
    • Sheet insertion improved with ‘insert sheet’ button.
  • General
    • Improved complex-text Input Method popup positioning support;
    • Reduced dialog flicker;
    • Updated translations – with thanks to the LibreOffice community;
    • Updated support warning when used with many users (thanks to Kopano);
    • Use a hard random /tmp directory name inside our jails;
    • Force UTF-8 locale for kit processes.
  • Powerful new scripting API for integrators

Online demo

You can get an online demo of Collabora Online and try it out yourself right now!
Try the Online Demo

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.

Using Collabora Online to accelerate document conversion

Nowadays we have different ways of converting our documents, using different tools that are available online. One option is JODConverter: (for Java OpenDocument Converter) a widely used tool that automates document conversions. Supported formats include OpenDocument, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Office formats (DOC/DOCX/RTF, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX) and many others. Usage can be as a Java library, a command line tool, or a web application. Traditionally the JODConverter uses a LibreOffice process for its conversion but newer versions of JODConverter can use Collabora Online directly.*

We built a dedicated page on our website explaining why you should consider switching to either the Collabora Online backend or more simply talk directly to Collabora Online itself.

What are the main benefits of using Collabora Online for document conversion?

  • Improved performance compared to startup-convert-shutdown approach;
  • The REST API is more reliable than starting LibreOffice in server mode and communicating via remote UNO;
  • More secure because the conversion happens in an isolated environment and this layered approach protects your infrastructure (from outer to inner layers):
    • It is easy to run it in a Virtual Machine / Docker Container;
    • Document data isolation into per-document chroots;
    • Seccomp-bpf: inside that chroot (almost) no system calls are allowed;
    • Extremely sparse filesystem inside the chroot: no shell etc.

For more details checkout our page that explains more about the benefits, performance, and how to try out JODConverter with its Collabora Online backend. If you have questions, feel free to send us an email.

Check it out!

Meet us this weekend in Hamburg!

When…

On 7th to 8th April – this weekend- we will be in Hamburg, Germany to attend LibreOffice Hackfest. It’s again the time to meet other contributors to the project to “hack” all together. At the Hackfest will be EasyHacks prepared for anyone wanting to do their first code contributons to the project and we will be around to help every interested newcomer.

Will you join us?

If you will be around and would like to have a chat with us drop us an email and we would be happy to see you there.

Check out the wiki page for more details.

See you soon! 🙂