Collabora & DWave Systems: a success story

D-Wave Systems is the world’s first quantum computing company and the leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems and software. D-Wave’s mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing and solve the world’s most challenging problems.

Quantum computing, however, has a learning curve. Edward (Denny) Dahl, Principal Research Scientist, and lead trainer visit customer sites to conduct training classes for customers. He travels to customer locations to set up training environments for students. You might think that quantum computing needs equally complicated tools for training. But that’s not the case. One of the tools in Dahl’s toolbox is a simple spreadsheet that he uses to guide students through a sequence of models of a very simple quantum computer. Dahl wants to ensure that his tool is platform agnostic, as customers use heterogeneous environments, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Not every spreadsheet program is compatible with all these platforms.

The good news is that LibreOffice is a fully open source project. Anyone can add the features they need. But it does mean a lot of work. It needs in-house resources and expertise. In many cases, that turns out to be counterproductive and more expensive. That’s where Collabora, as a company, enters the picture. We make it extremely easy for customers like D-Wave to work with us and implement the features and functionalities they need.

We provided source code (VBA) to Collabora with the requirement that the Calc program should be extended to handle the VBA,” said Dahl “Collabora’s ability to extend the underlying VBA meant that the same spreadsheet could run under both Excel & LibreOffice. It meant that D-Wave did not have to maintain two separate VBA code bases, which was the deciding factor to go with Collabora,

The winner of their choice was Collabora Productivity as our LibreOffice-based solution met all of his requirements. Collabora enabled D-Wave to support the heterogeneous environment his customers were running and democratized his tool. With Collabora, D-Wave is able to go beyond laptops and run the tool anywhere, including public and private cloud.

Further information

To read more details about the success story, check out the case study document we have published.

Case Study

“D-Wave, the company behind Quantum Computing uses
Collabora Productivity solution”

If you want to collaborate with us and publish a case study together please contact us at hello@collaboraoffice.com.

Winners of the open source classic award at DINAcon!

On 19th October 2018, at Welle7 Workspace in Bern, Switzerland, we attended DINAcon – the conference on digital sustainability. Our General Manager, Michael Meeks, had a talk about “How best to migrate to LibreOffice”, where he explained the best ways to move to a supported Open Source and Open Standards solution. Also, he talked about Collabora’s latest work with our partners, and our new tool to migrate existing legacy Visual Basic line of business apps.

If you missed his talk then check out the slides above for the complete presentation:

Download the slides from the presentation “How best to migrate to LibreOffice”!

DINAcon Awards!

Great news from Bern – we won the open source classic award at DINAcon! 🙂

For this award were running a lot of amazing open source products, including Collabora Online and Collabora Office. We are honored to receive this award – it is a big motivation for the whole team! Thanks a lot everyone for your support.

Hacknight

The conference ended with the hacknight and of course that we couldn’t miss it. It was the perfect time to work on LibreOffice bugs. 🙂

Digital Economy Award

Another nomination! Collabora Office & Collabora Online are nominated for the Digital Economy Award 2018 and our partners, Adfinis SyGroup, presented about our products in front of the jury of the Swiss Digital Economy Award. (Thank you, Nicolas. 🙂 )

The winners will be announced at the Digital Economy Award Night, on November 21, in the Hallenstadion in Zurich. Until then, fingers crossed. 🙂

LibreOffice Conference in Tirana, Albania!

This year the LibreOffice Conference was held in Tirana, Albania from September 25 to September 28, 2018. As a tradition, all our team was there and gave several talks.

Sept. 25th: Tuesday – Team building day

The special Collabora team-building event happened just before the LibreOffice Conference, on Tuesday, September 25, 2018! In the sunny city of Tirana, we played an exciting Stand-up paddling game, learned more about the history of Albania by visiting the National Museum and then we had a relaxing lunch in a traditional restaurant in Tirana.

Sept. 26th: Wednesday – First day

The first day of the LibreOffice conference started! Marina Latini and Italo Vignoli welcomed us at this edition of LibOCon, three days full of interesting presentations. Also, we had the mayor of Tirana, Erion Veliaj, who gave a warm welcome to everyone at the city of Tirana. He shared the progress done by the Municipality of Tirana by implementing open source software.

We are thrilled to be the largest code-committer this year (with 5302 code commits), alongside Red Hat and the community!

Collabora was again this year a proud sponsor of the conference and Michael had a presentation regarding the involvement Collabora has with LibreOffice! 🙂

From Collabora Productivity team Luboš had a talk about “Reducing Build Time“, Tor about “Improving LibreOffice as a MSO replacement for Automation and VB Clients“, Tomaž about “Image Handling Rework“, Jan about “New features in the Online since the last conference“, Ashod about “PDFium for better PDF rendering and editing“, Luboš about “Improving Calc parallel calculations“, Mike about “Central Configuration Management for LibreOffice in Windows networks” and the last one was by Tamas about “Database migration in LibreOffice“.

Of course that even this year we couldn’t miss out on handing some really nice swag for the participants! 🙂

In the evening it was the time for the community dinner that took place at Brauhaus. A very lovely evening that we spent enjoying the delicious food under the company of the friendly LibreOffice community. At the end of the dinner, we had a surprise for everyone – we celebrated our 5th anniversary!

Sept. 27th: Thursday – Second day

The second day of the conference started very early and with a lot of energy. On the second day, we had talks from Michael about “Meet the Engineering Steering Committee”, Ashod about “Shrink and Load: Optimizing for speed and footprint“, Michael about “Economics, Marketing & LibreOffice”, Andras about “Level 3 support case studies” and Luboš about “Profiling with Callgrind“.

The HackNight took place on Thursday, from 7 PM, at Destil where we spent the night hacking on LibreOffice and enjoying some pizza!

Sept. 28th: Friday – Third day

Last day of the conference! On the third day of LibOCon our team members Szymon, Miklos, Marco, Jan and Tor had various talks. Szymon had a talk about “Latest improvements in PPTX support“, Miklos about “Editing ReqIF-XHTML fragments with Writer“, Marco about “Adding support for grouping header entries in Calc Online“, Jan about “Async dialog execution – what is that and why it’s needed” and Tor about “Recent Mac-specific bug fixing and possible future Mac-specific work“.

And we came to the end of the conference, celebrating the birthday of LibreOffice and announcing the next city where will be hosted LibOCon!

Even this year LibOCon was a great event. Kudos to the organizing team for their great job!

See you soon in Almeria, Spain!

PS: PS: If you missed LibOCon and you are interested to see the presentations from our team, we have thought about you too! 🙂 You can download all the hybrid PDF files by clicking the button below or one by one through the links in this article. Files are under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.