Collabora’s LibreOffice development experts are supporting students for GSoC 2020

Collabora developers are mentoring students during this year’s Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is an amazing, international program encouraging the participation of university students in open source software development. It enables students to independently gain practical experience on concrete projects and matches them with experienced developers. This year a record number of almost 1200 students is taking part in the sponsored projects. Collabora is always delighted to support GSoC projects: some of our experienced developers are mentoring the students: guiding them in the code, encouraging them, and supporting the growth of their skills.

Collabora developers at GSoC 2020

Also for this year’s GSoC several students are being mentored by Collabora Productivity team members. Tomaž Vajngerl, Muhammet Kara, Miklos Vajna, Mike Kaganski, and Michael Meeks are assisting the work on several projects around LibreOffice. And our companies involvement is not just limited to that. Andrej Shadura, a developer from our parent company Collabora, is in charge of various projects around the Debian operating system. Collabora’s support of these Google Summer of Code reflects our commitment to open source software and is also a matter of personal attachment. Several of today’s Collaborans like Elie Tournier and Rohan Garg have successfully participated in the GSoC program in the past. So have the current mentors Muhammet Kara, Miklos Vajna, and Pranam Lashkari from Collabora Productivity team.

A success story – development camps in Turkey

The successful application of no less than six LibreOffice office projects for this year’s Summer of Code would not be fully told without mentioning some previous happenings in winter. Collabora Productivity had sponsored the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara and the LibreOffice Development Workshop at the Anadolu University in Eskişehir (Turkey) during the Free Software Wintercamp 2020. These ambitious development courses by Muhammet Kara spawned no less than three of the six successfully submitted LibreOffice projects of GSoC 2020. Find out more about the great outcome of these development camps within our community news blog post.

LibreOffice projects mentored by Collabora Productivity

The student Ahmad Ganzouri has successfully submitted two projects. Supported by the mentors Tomaž Vajngerl, Miklos Vajna, and Michael Meeks, he will work on a project adding blurry shadows to objects in LibreOffice and on a second one that aims to move the current gallery data in favour to easier to handle ZIP files. Yusuf Keten, another participant of the LibreOffice Developers Bootcamp in Ankara, will be working on additions to better integrate extensions. Keten’s project is being mentored by Collabora’s Muhammet Kara.

Also Collabora’s parent company developers are mentoring

Another interesting GSoC project is bringing a CiviCRM integration to LibreOffice and Collabora Office. “Styles Inspector“, also mentored by Tomaž Vajngerl, is another project aimed at LibreOffice. We all look forward to the results of the students work. And for sure we will try to cover some of that here. Another wonderful story is that of Collabora Productivity developer Pranam Lashkari. He was a GSoC student during the last two years while graduating and this year he is already a mentor for two projects within the Boost C++ libraries. Collabora developer Andrej Shadura is mentoring no less than three projects focusing on Android SDK Tools for the Debian operating system. Find out more about these and other noteworthy projects in the Collabora news blog.

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a program awarding a three months stipend to students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. The annual program started in 2005. This year, 199 organizations and 1199 student projects are taking part. Within the last 15 years more than 15.000 students from over 100 countries had been accepted. Developers from free and open source projects serve as mentors. Between 80 – 90% of the accepted projects get completed successfully.

Collabora Online update available – version 4.2.3

New features

  • Support for drop down lists in form fields in ODT and DOCX and other text file formats
  • Handling of tabstops directly on the ruler in text documents

Most important improvements and fixes

  • Started to support WOPI proof keys (see also: https://wopi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/scenarios/proofkeys.html)
  • Packages for Ubuntu 20.04
  • Fixed Insert – Image (from storage) on Firefox and IE11
  • Fixed PDF printing of multi-page documents
  • Fixed Number format controls in Calc
  • Calc multiline formula bar improved
  • Updated translations

Read complete release notes here.




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.

Online development CI accessible via the internet

It’s now easier to check the status of your /libreoffice/online patches

Recently the CI (continuous integration) infrastructure for Online has been made accessible via the internet. Now developers from outside Collabora can directly check the status of their patches and builds.

 

Already for a while there was a Jenkins instance that checks patches on gerrit for the online-project (and our other projects), before they are submitted to cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/online/
This service is now running on dedicated hardware, what allows us to make it accessible directly from the internet. Links pointing to this server in TDF gerrit will work from now on.

 

How to participate in the project

This growing  access to our development makes it easier to join the project. Which we of course encourage 🙂  Therefore… read more about participating in developing LibreOffice online here!

If you have any questions, please leave a message here.

Collabora Office for Android & iOS version 4.2.3 released

New features to work with your DOCX and ODT text document as well as performance improvements and fixes

Version 4.2.3 of our popular mobile apps Collabora Office for Android and iOS has been released. This update includes improvements and fixes on performance and stability plus updated translations. You read more about these in our release notes. Version 4.2.3 also brings new handy features for when you work with DOCX, ODT or other text documents.

Tabstops handling on the ruler in text documents

In version 4.2.3 of our mobile app it is now possible to handle tabstops with a touch on the ruler. This function is available on tablets. The ruler is not shown on the small displays of phones.

Handling tabstops on the ruler in a text document on a tablet

Page setup panel on phones

Also in writer, the hamburger menu on phones now opens the page setup panel. You can set size, orientation and margins.

Page setup panel for text files on phones

Get Collabora Office

Collabora Office for Android and iOS enables editing of documents on the go and is developed with your privacy in mind. Learn more about it on the product page and download it for free from the App Store of from Google Play.

Collabora Online demo servers provide fast and easy user access

With interest in Collabora Online growing fast, more and more people want an easy way to play with the software before setting it up themselves at-home, on-premise or from a hosting partner. We expect some of hosting partners to use this too as an easy way to show-case their locally hosted server solutions.

We are always looking into ways to make setup easier, and we are now happy to announce the availability of demo servers from Nextcloud’s Collabora Online (richdocuments) App! We are grateful to work side by side with Nextcloud to deliver this to their users, and will be working with our other partners to integrate similar functionality in due course.

Users can now easily checkout the latest builds of Collabora Online Development Edition directly from their own Nextcloud installation, without the need to install a full Collabora Online server.

 

Demo user: choose a server and agree to experiment

Users of the demo servers must agree to the terms of service upon first use, as well as after each product update. Clearly these are not for production use – we recommend our hosting partners for real, hosted production use. We remind users that their documents are stored (temporarily, while open for editing) on the demo servers of Collabora or on those of one of our partners. This clearly contrasts with an on-premise solution where you can keep all of your documents on your own site as well as controlling performance and networking. Collabora Online really is the ideal solution for using your own servers for securely working on documents online.

With these demo servers, users may experience mixed performance, depending on the number of users using the service, but of course we can use that same usage-data in order to further optimize product performance. Users are not asked for any personal data (email address, etc.).

Sysadmins information

To activate the new demo-server feature, just two clicks of the sysadmin are enough to allow users to choose to connect to a server with a fully functional version of Collabora Online. This option is, of course, available on the administration page of the Collabora Online App.


Solving connection issues

We’ve seen reports of connection problems, caused by an incorrect/out of date configuration. The solution (in short): /hosting/capabilities/ endpoint should be readable (the reverse proxy setup in use is out of date)! You can find the necessary info on our pages for Setting up Nginx .. and Setting up Apache .. reverse proxy.

(Interested in discussion and background info? Pls read here.)

For partners, in cooperation with partners

We encourage our partners to help us provide demo servers in their local geography, and add them to our list to broadcast the benefits of their local provision of Collabora Online to a wider circle.


If you would like to integrate this with your solution – please checkout the server list (JSON). Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or ideas.


Not yet a partner? Please check out all partner advantages and contact us for more info.

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