Collabora Online 4.0.9 – Watermark improvements in Secure View, CentOS 8/RHEL 8 support, and more!

Cambridge, United Kingdom, November 28, 2019Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, providing Collabora Online and other enterprise supported products, is excited to announce a new release of our product Collabora Online 4.0.9. This release comes with interesting new features and bugfixes too.

What’s new in Collabora Online 4.0.9?

Features

  • Improved watermark rendering in Secure View.
    • It is possible to override watermarks from the config file.
    • Watermarks are 45° rotated.
    • Watermarks are not displayed outside of the document area.

  • Search results are highlighted in read-only documents.

  • Action_Save now supports ExtendedData with custom contents, which is passed to the WOPI-like Host.
  • New setting to always save documents on exit and upload to the WOPI-like Host.
  • Introduced the “TemplateSource” WOPI property (for Nextcloud’s GlobalScale architecture).
  • New platform supported: CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

Bug-fixes

  • Improved stability, shutdown, and service life-cycle management.
  • Calc’s NOW() function shows the server’s local time correctly
  • Build with latest POCO C++ Libraries 1.9.4

Getting Collabora Online 4.0.9

Collabora Online is suitable for large scale deployment, comes with an SLA, Long Term Support with signed security updates as well as a rich product management interaction helping to direct our development priorities.

Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out more information on partner integrations and online demos. For tailored solutions, contact sales@collaboraoffice.com.

Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner by filling in the partner form or contacting sales@collaboraoffice.com.

Collabora Online is only one part of a larger Enterprise File Sync & Share, Groupware, or Hosting solution. Collabora is excited to go to market with a long list of Partners each of which has an integration and provides you with useful support.

Online demo

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

For more information:

About Collabora Productivity:

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and 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, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

French service company Arawa implementing Collabora Online for the University of Lille

A Customer Case Study showing how students & staffs are allowed to collaborate on common online office documents at the University of Lille, France.

Arawa, a French services company specialized in Open Source and collaborative software, has successfully delivered a Collabora Online implementation to streamline collaborative efforts and support a new generation of student services, deployed at the University of Lille, in the north of France.

Seamlessly integrated with Nextcloud, the on-premise file share and collaboration platform, the University of Lille implemented another service aiming at easing collaboration projects between students and also between staff members: they now provide potentially more than 70 000 people with Collabora Online to help them work on a common framework of online office tools.

“The University is really aiming at facilitating open standards across the whole campus. Students especially came from different IT cultures and used so many different office tools and software products, that it made sense and became crucial to put a common solution at their disposal. And following our benchmark, Collabora Online fits in perfectly with Nextcloud.”
Cédric Foll, IT Director at University of Lille

Université de Lille

Reducing the number of tools used internally had also become an important challenge. The large number of tools mainly used by students did not really help secure a Research environment, and all the confidential information that is produced in such an environment.

“The project is aligned with our ambitions for the University of Lille”, said Pierre Boulet, VP of digital transformation. “In this case, Collabora Online is helping to support a huge student community.  It will also increase the University’s attractiveness to candidates and provide extra resources to make student life easier.”
Pierre Boulet, VP of digital transformation at University of Lille

The digital transformation of the University of Lille is really about the wider picture. It will help the University team enhance the overall student experience, and in the meanwhile, it will reinforce the image of the University as one in an on-going process of improvements.

“This project is a great example of how Collabora fulfills requirements of a powerful online office suite, ideally suited within Nextcloud. Data security was a key requirement here. They needed a solution which could be hosted on premises, and where they have a total control of the data.”
Philippe Hemmel, CEO of Arawa

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“Arawa is an excellent partner”, said Michael Meeks, General Manager, Collabora Productivity, “We love to work as part of their their expert and dedicated service for their customers, and congratulate them on this implementation of Collabora Online.”
Michael Meeks, General Manager, Collabora Productivity

Download the full case study

Case Study

“Arawa: How Collabora Online helped students &
staff better collaborate at the University of Lille in France.”

 

About Université de Lille

The University of Lille is a multidisciplinary, research-intensive university whose researchers collaborate with many partners throughout Europe and the world. With 67,000 students (including 7,300 international students), 6,300 staff members, 66 research units, and diplomas in all fields of study, the University of Lille is a major player in the region in training, research, innovation, and its commitment to social issues.

About Arawa

Arawa is a French IT services company, distributing and implementing Open-Source software solutions. These solutions offer collaborative capabilities to edit, store and share on-premises contents, with a high-level of security and control of the data. Thanks to a combination of deep functional and technical expertise, Arawa’s consultants deliver personalized and tailor-made solutions around a suite of open-source products: Nextcloud, LibreOffice, Collabora Online, OnlyOffice et Nayego.
Visit Arawa or follow @Arawa_fr on Twitter.

About Collabora

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of other 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 benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit Collabora Office or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter

Collabora sponsoring LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara

On November 13 more than 120 students in Ankara Hacettepe University’s Beytepe Campus joined the first session of the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp, a course for students with interest in C++. There is a session every week, until the end of the semester.
 
Collabora Sponsored LibreOffice Bootcamp in Ankara
 

 

The announcement of the course was received with enthusiasm at Twitter!

 

The first sessions gave a broad introduction on the course, Free Software & Open Source, LibreOffice & Collabora and requirements for the course. And after that, really into development: installations & setup, different IDEs, git, gcc, clang and the basics of C++.

 

 

 

The instructor of this course, Muhammet Kara, recently also held a talk about Google Summer of Code. Starting from that point, then doing a project for LibreOffice, he grew to a developer working for Collabora.

After the first session, Muhammet tells “There were many enthusiastic participants, even some from outside the town. I’m sure that at the end of the course, there will be many students with pretty good skills in C++ and LibreOffice development.

This course in Ankara can be organized thanks to of course support of the Hacettepe University for the use of the amphitheater, Hacettepe ACM Student Chapter for the local/logistics organization, Collabora for sponsoring, and the enthusiasm and knowledge that Collabora developer Muhammet Kara is putting into it.

The weekly sessions will be given until the end of the semester, January next year. So if you’re motivated and love open source.. you may still be able to join 🙂 !

Collabora Office available as first free open source office app for iOS

Effort by Adfinis SyGroup and Collabora bringing open source office to the world of Apple iOS and iPad

For the first time there is a free / open source office suite available on iOS: Collabora Office, thanks to the efforts led by Adfinis SyGroup and Collabora. What started back in around 1992 as the well-known StarOffice, then was OpenOffice.org and now lives on as LibreOffice, is finally available on every relevant platform including (but not limited to) iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Android1, Chrome OS, Windows, Linux and also in the browser.

There is a lot we want to tell you about this first open source office app for iOS. In this blog we write a bit more on the technical part; the blog at Adfinis, has more focus on the interesting history.
But let us first show how it looks!

Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.
Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.
Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS
Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS

 

Composing texts in Collabora Office iOS.
Composing texts in Collabora Office iOS.

 

Get Collabora Office on iOS from the App Store

There are currently two possible ways to get the app:

  1. Download Testflight through the Apple Store and use this link to join:
    This will give you the latest releases – which are not fully tested, and available to just try and test

  2. Download the app through the Apple Store.

Over the past months, more than 60 versions have been released and the number of improvements and enhancements is for more than a hundred!

Built with online innovation

Collabora Online is built on technological innovation. And on a rich history, starting more than 30 years ago by StarOffice, following OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. We suggest you to read the blog post at Adfinis with interesting details. The innovative part was already mentioned in our first blog post. Collabora Office for iOS is built on the technology that was developed by Collabora to bring LibreOffice to the cloud. An important part of this technology is called LibreOfficeKit. This is a layer allowing to use the LibreOffice we all know on the server side and from there publish documents in the browser. And since LibreOffice is capable of opening the largest possible set of documents, Collabora Online has the same capability in nearly every modern browser!

And there is more that is interesting: the document on the screen is published as tiled images, which means that it doesn’t leave the server, which is especially useful for working online securely. The UI itself, for different platforms, is build with HTML/JS, on top off the VCL, the LibreOffice Visual Class Library. This enables the Collabora app to use many elements of the extensive functionality of LibreOffice’s UI.

A really nice advantage of this approach is that we cover three major scenarios with essentially this one solution:

  • Online — see e. g. Collabora Online

  • iOS — what we are presenting you now

  • Android — work in progress, available through the Android Beta channel

This means that future improvements that are implemented for one platform will also benefit the other implementations.

Native look and feel & finger usage

Apple has put a lot of effort into creating great UX guidelines and great GUI widgets for iOS. However, VCL (the GUI toolkit used within the LibreOffice core) was born long before iOS and it doesn’t look and behave like a native iOS app. And even though development took the path of LibreOffice online, a lot of effort was needed in order to make VCL look, feel and behave more like an actual iOS app.

The sidebar makes settings easily accessible

A very important feature to make the app easier to use, is the sidebar. The sidebar contains contextual features and makes good use of the wide screens of the iPads.

Working with tables in text documents.
Working with tables in text documents.

 

Including pictures in Writer documents
Including pictures in Writer documents

 

Selection of cells in a spreadsheet
Selection of cells in a spreadsheet

 

Finger sized resize and rotate handles

Many tasks can be done with the fingers: resizing or rotating an image, change the size of a row or column in a table, etc.

The whole team has put a lot of effort in developing and testing those things work. And honestly we think that the result is quite nice.

Integrating iOS spellchecker

iOS offers spell checking as part of the basic system functionality. We integrated this functionality into the app. So now Collabora Office on iOS nicely uses the system spell checker in order to eliminate misspelled words!

Spell checking in Collabora Office on iOS
Spell checking in Collabora Office on iOS

GUI widgets in iOS style

Drop down menus and check boxes have their own style in Apple iOS and so we make the widget in Collabora look similar as much as possible. The result is nice and we’ll try to improve even further. This thanks to the work of for example Collabora developers Szymon Kłos, who wrote a blog post2 about the work of using native widgets in the future, and Tomaž Vajngerl, who gave a presentation about Custom Widget Themes during the LibreOffice Conference 20193 in Almeria.

Rich features in user interface
Rich features in user interface

 

Handles to select text in iOS style

The text handles look like those of a current iOS app. Currently they behave a bit differently and we work on improving this. That however turns out to be far from trivial.

Selection handles in Collabora on iOS
Selection handles in Collabora on iOS

Inserting pictures through the iOS camera / image gallery

Inserting pictures behaves like in any other app. You can either take a picture with the device camera or select one from your image gallery.

How this helps LibreOffice on Android

As already described above, Collabora leads the effort to use the same approach we use in the iOS app to deliver a new Android app.
During GSOC 2019 Kaishu Sahu did a great job and improved the Android app a lot. Jan Holesovsky (Collabora) is working to improve the situation even further and we should see a public release not too far in the future.
If you’re interested to learn more about the Android efforts or how to join, please contact Collabora.

What’s next for Collabora Office?

While we all work on further improvements, we there are very good reasons to be happy with what has been achieved so far 😉 And of course the good news is that you can experience that yourself.

For the near future, we already have the following things in mind:

  • Create shiny templates

  • Implement native widgets / improve UX

  • Reduce latency

  • Better support hardware keyboards (and shortcuts)

  • Fix more rough edges

  • Make more core features accessible (math formulas, image cropping, …)

  • Reduce number of needed clicks for simple things (change cell background in a writer table, change text wrap of a picture, …)

Note that these points may change — this list is not a road map!

It’s your turn: you can help to make this better!

If you plan to use LibreOffice in an enterprise environment, whether on the desktop, on Android or on an iPad, we strongly recommend the enterprise ready version offered by Collabora. You’ll enjoy the advantages of an SLA, long-term support and last but not least it is a very good way to enhance the development of things like this iOS app!

Let’s be frank: money is very helpful to further speed up the development. So, if your organization plans to use LibreOffice on iOS (or any other platform) we’re happy to get you on board! Please don’t hesitate to contact Adfinis directly or Collabora Productivity to discuss possible ways to support the development.

Some words of thanks

This fantastic work would not be possible without the strong support and investment of Collabora and Adfinis SyGroup pays. Thanks to the entire crew that works hard every day to provide more free / open source solutions to the people out there!

 

(1 The Android App is still in Beta. The release is expected later this quarter.

2 http://eszkadev.blogspot.com/2019/09/native-widgets-on-mobile-for-online.html

3 https://conference.libreoffice.org/2019 )

 

 

For more information

Follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter or send us an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com