Starting from today’s release more users around the globe will benefit from Collabora Office on iOS and Android! With the just released version 4.2.6 there is full support of CJK fonts and also the user interface has various related improvements.
Fonts available on your mobile device for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Arabic and other scripts, will now be used by the app. This gives many new users the native usability they need, the privacy and control over their data with a quality product they expect from a Collabora.
The updated Collabora Office mobile apps do now support a wide range of scripts and fonts natively available on your phone. Namely, those are:
Chinese (Mandarin, simplified)
Chinese (Mandarin, traditional)
Hindi
Japanese
Korean
Thai
Vietnamese
Example of Writer document with different Asian fonts
Improvement in fontconfig
The support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and other previously unsupported scripts, could be added thanks to a performance fix in fontconfig. This allows resulted in a much improved loading time of the app. Thanks to Behdad Esfahbod (branch faster), fontconfig authors and contributors, and Michael Weghorn (for updating fontconfig) for their work on this!
All info
Do you want to learn more about the mobile office apps by Collabora Productivity? Find all the relevant info summarized on the product page. A good reference for those interested in the detailed development progress of Collabora Office for Android & iOS are the latest release notes. If you want to find out about the history of the apps and the people and entities involved, we suggest you take a look at our detailed chronological credits article.
Collabora Online is the business ready supported product for professional use. Collabora products are built on LibreOffice technology. Collabora is the creator of LibreOffice online.
Collabora Office for Android and iOS enables editing of documents on the go and is developed with your privacy in mind. Download it for free from the App Store of from Google Play.
From now on the powerful Mail Merge feature will be even more useful: you can send encrypted PDF files directly from Collabora Office Writer!
A handy feature of Collabora Office Writer since long, is doing a mail merge that directly sends out PDF files. From now on you can make the PDF files encrypted, adding additional privacy option to your work. The feature will be available in Collabora Office 6.2-21 and 6.4, and has of course been pushed to the LibreOffice master branch as well. Thanks to Collabora for sponsoring this work and kudos for Gülşah Köse for doing the work. In this article we’ll show you how to set this up.
Mail merge preparations
Of course, you need to have done the usual preparations for mail merge. We’ll briefly show a few essential steps.
Set up the mail server
This allows you to directly mail the merged documents from Collabora Office.
Open (a file in) Writer.
Select Tools→Options → Collabora Office Writer → Mail Merge Email
And fill the fields like following (with your own information)
Filling in the user information for Mail Merge
Click the Server Authentication button and fill with your information and click OK.
If the first option is insufficient, then of course also fill in the other information.
Adding additional information for Mail Merge
From the Options dialog click the Test Settings button to see if your information is OK.
If so, you will see the following dialog. If not, check the information again.
Success! This dialog confirms the correct account settings
Click OK from the Options dialog. Then mail server should be set now.
Prepare the database / data source
Collabora Office can link to various data sources. In this case, of course an email address and a password to encrypt the PDF file must be provided by the database.
The simple table below, has fields / columns for emails and passwords.
Address data for Mail Merge can be compiled in a spreadsheet
You have to make sure that this data source is used.
Chose Edit→ Exchange Database…
Click View→Data Source to use that database in Collabora Office
Next steps are of course creating a template document with fields and content. It is not necessary that the email and password fields are in the template – you must select these later on.
Do the mail merge
To send the document use Tools→Mail Merge Wizard or click the icon on toolbar.
In the Wizard:
1. Select Use current document and click Next
2. Select E-mail message and click Next
3. Click “Select the address list”. Select your sheet from the menu and click OK.
4. Click “Finish”.
We are ready for sending documents.
Click the “Send Documents” icon from the toolbar
The Mail Merge icons can be activated via View > Toolbars > Mail Merge
Chose to save and send with password
As a last step, you will see the following dialog.
Chose “Send as Adobe PDF”
Then the password option will be available. Select it.
The final settings before your encrypted PDF will be sent
The password for each PDF file will be taken from the database of recipients, thus allowing the use of individual passwords.
Click the “Send Documents” button and wait for the process to finish.
That’s all. We hope you like this. 🙂
Test Collabora Office
If you want to learn more about our long term supported Collabora Office 6.2 (supported until December 2022 at least) and its possibilities and advantages for your organization, get info and a demo here!
London, July 24 2020 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind LibreOffice in the cloud, announces the immediate availability of Collabora Office for Chromebooks, its first native productivity tool for Chrome OS.
User control of documents on Chrome OS
Chromebooks are popular, and their use continues to grow rapidly. However, until now they have lacked a rich office productivity tool that users could combine with their choice of storage, to regain control over their files and privacy.
Today, we make a new release of Collabora Office, the LibreOffice-technology based suite for professional, mobile, and online use, available ready to run on Chromebooks!
Privacy Shield
Chromebooks are not the only relevant positive trend. The desire to keep control over data and document storage is another. With digital sovereignty becoming a hot topic for regional and national administrations and by the EU, who have launched a special program in this area.
The recent EU court ruling that declares that the US Privacy Shield conflicts with the GDPR, has further raised people’s awareness of digital freedom and sovereignty.
Education
Since Chromebooks are attractive and affordable PCs, they are present everywhere these days and with today’s release of Collabora Office, users control over their files and privacy is back. Because of the rich features it is not needed to use Microsoft or Google for professional use or for study. These benefits, make education an area where both Collabora Online and Chromebooks are widely used.
“Collabora is thrilled to provide even more convenient products for schools and universities. […] We are glad to serve our many partners in the education market, and together to protect the privacy of students.” – Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity
Collabora Products are popular because they allow organizations to have applications and storage on-site and be GDPR compliant, still working with excellent collaboration and interoperability tools for office productivity.
Rich editing, work with images, comment and more in windows mode
Working with partners
While Collabora has developed almost the entirety of this mobile technology and UX, we are profoundly grateful for support from our partners. For this release, we are indebted to AMD for helping to bring the existing Android app to their next generation of extraordinary Chromebooks.
Really richly featured
Chromebook’s popularity clearly shows that businesses and education increasingly opt for the reliable and straightforward Google platform. But do users get a great feature richness to work on their files?
With the new Collabora Office, users get an app that not only supports all their documents (from Microsoft formats DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, DOC, XLS, PPT to the open standards ODF) and offers viewing and working on text and contents, but also provides rich editing with a handsome interface for e.g., images, page formatting, charts, and indices.
Setting the right Bullets and Numbering style
Working with Columns in text files
Save to your private cloud only
Private friendly cloud storage solutions, such as Nextcloud and ownCloud, provide plugins for Chrome OS that allow users to write directly to their private cloud, without having to save to the device first, after which the file would be saved directly on the Google or Microsoft server storage as well..
Collabora Office matches perfectly with the wish to save directly to your own cloud. It allows users to use the mentioned plugins with ease and not be forced to save their office documents to someone else’s server anymore.
Arriving ahead of native platform curve
With the release of Collabora Office for mobile devices version 4.2.5, Chrome OS is fully supported by Collabora Office. Our products now run on iOS, Windows, Android, Chromebook, and Linux and of course, in any modern browser.
Collabora Office brings its first native productivity tool for Chrome OS, ahead of Google’s recently announced work to bring Microsoft’s Office to Chromebooks. The currently available mobile Microsoft Office apps in contrast provides just a limited set of features.
Remember that, to be able to enjoy the Collabora Online on a Chromebook, a recent version of Chrome OS, that includes the Android Runtime (for Google Play), is required.
On the technical side, the new Collabora Office release supports two new platforms: x86 and AMD64. X86 was needed to run native on the Chromebooks, and with AMD64 we matched the need for a a 64-bit version, as required by Google Play.
Users of Collabora Office on Android may remember that the first Android builds were able to start up on Chromebooks. However that was by coincidence. These worked under a slower emulation, and were missing lots of required polishing and performance.
We’re really happy to announce that with today’s release – version 4.2.5 – Collabora Online offers another important integration: with the Microsoft document management and storage server SharePoint.
Collabora Online brings easy integration with SharePoint Server
Collabora Online is widely recognized as the perfect solution to integrate with applications for file sharing and collaboration. Now with the new integration with the popular and widely used SharePoint server, many more organizations will benefit from Collabora’s possibilities for collaboration, rich editing, expert interoperability and business support.
This is how it looks
Using your DOCX and ODT files
Opening e.g. Visio and Publisher files from SharePoint
What’s more in Collabora Online 4.2.5
Collabora Online also comes with various bug fixes.
All details are available on the 4.2 Release Notes page.
Configuration details
Integration of SharePoint server 2016 with Collabora Online is really easy. This blog post shows the configuration that is needed.
All you need to do for the integration of SharePoint server 2016 with Collabora Online, is the following configuration settings. And you have to deploy Collabora Online, version 4.2.5 or higher.
Configure Collabora Online
1. SharePoint uses WOPI security and requires using a proof key to authenticate WOPI applications.
The proof key is automatically generated by postinst script of the loolwsd package, so normally no user interaction is needed to set this up.
In the unexpected case, when this automatic setup does not work, use this command to generate an RSA key:
loolwsd-generate-proof-key
In case your config dir is not /etc, you need to check loolwsd.log, which would contain a warning about missing proof-key in discovery.
The warning would contain the command line to use for manual generation of the key, like this:
2. Authorize the SharePoint server in Collabora Online. Open loolwsd.xml, and add a host element under WOPI storage element for the SharePoint WOPI host:
<host allow="true">sharepoint-host-name</host>
If you do not authorize WOPI host, this will result in failure opening documents.
The server’s name which was not matched would then be listed in loolwsd.log.
3. Start Collabora Online.
Configure SharePoint
1. Open SharePoint Management Console, and execute the command:
Execute this command for all the file extensions that you want to be handled by Collabora Online.
If you use Collabora Online in a testing environment without SSL, then you need to add -AllowHTTP to the command. Running this command requires that no binding exists for this extension in the external zone that Collabora Online uses.
You may need to remove existing bindings first; see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-server/remove-spwopibinding?view=sharepoint-ps.
2. Collabora Online uses external WOPI zone.
Set-SPWOPIZone -Zone "external-http"
That’s all. Now SharePoint should use Collabora Online to open files with the configured extensions by default.
Changing the default action for any of the configured file types can be done by using SharePoint’s Get-SPWOPIBinding and Set-SPWOPIBinding commands (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-server/set-spwopibinding):
