Collabora Online 23.05 Released, Empowering Users with Enhanced Productivity and Collaboration Features

28 July 202328 July 2023 Naomi Obbard 3 Comments

Cambridge, July 25, 2023 – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Online 23.05.

Collabora Online provides businesses a richly featured, collaborative and secure document creation environment with dedicated support backed by decades of experience. This new release includes new features targeting three key areas: accessibility, interoperability and usability.

Collabora Online 23.05 introduces a sleeker and more intuitive user interface, designed to simplify and optimise the user experience. With a clean and modern look, navigating through various applications, accessing essential tools and accessing new features has never been easier.

Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in COOL 23.05 and where you can download it.

Accessibility Features

Accessibility features are created to provide comfort to all users, for example, those who prefer to use just a keyboard, those who cannot see the screen very well or those who have impairments.

Dark Mode and Custom View Settings

Per view settings, allows us to render views differently – including various options such as showing non-printing characters or spell checking underlines in different views, in addition to Dark Mode.

As anyone who’s worked on an important proposal late into the night will tell you, staring at a bright screen and concentration don’t often go hand in hand. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce Collabora Online’s Dark Mode.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The majority of computer users will use keyboard shortcuts to speed up their work and minimise the need to switch between different input devices. Previously, when collaboratively editing a file in Collabora Online, the shortcut settings were set to the language of the first user.

Now, the keyboard shortcuts have been expanded to allow all users to be able to use their own language’s keyboard shortcuts when editing a file collaboratively.

Another improvement to using keyboard shortcuts is the ability to hold the ‘Alt’ key to highlight your shortcut options for learnability.

Javascript Dialogs

We understand the importance of making software accessible to everyone. That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature that allows screen readers to access menus and dialogs. We have moved the dialog rendering to the client-side as JSDialogs, and converted all of our vex library usage to JSDialogs too, to enable higher accessibility.

This change will make it easier for those with visual impairments to navigate and interact with their documents through text-to-speech or braille displays. These accessibility wins bring benefits for everyone: in our previous releases we had 3 dialog types with 3 different looks. Now we have introduced a more consistent look across the board using JSDialogs.

Initial Screen Reading Support

Designed to assist users with visual impairments, this feature unlocks a world of possibilities, ensuring the visually impaired can participate in online collaboration.

Our initial enablement works in tabbed view mode and allows Writer to read paragraphs from the document as they are navigated through. When a user types, the screen reader reads the entered content.

For selections, after selecting ‘Hello’, the screen reader will typically say: “Hello, selected”. In the same way, if text is deselected, the screen reader reports the state change: “Hello, unselected”. Screen reading is a complex area that is best tuned to an individual users’s needs, and NVDA provides a rich palette of functions that can be toggled on or off. Moreover there are specific shortcuts for explicitly asking the NVDA screen reader to read the focused paragraph, the current text selection and so on.

This initial screen reader support is currently only supported for tabbed mode. Screen reader support is not enabled by default, since it is a resource consuming feature. It can be turned on by toggling within the UI (Help → Accessibility Support) or modifying the coolwsd.xml configuration file. Search for the accessibility section in coolwsd.xml and set the enable item to true.

Interoperability Features

For some time, users and organizations have faced a major challenge when trying to find an alternative to Microsoft’s widely-used productivity suite: the issue of file compatibility and interoperability. These improvements continue to build on our already solid base of excellent interoperability.

Document Themes

Document themes are predefined formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance, add your own branding and give it a consistent feel. They usually include a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text. When the formatting is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that formatting.

Themes also allows the user to choose between multiple default looks of objects when inserting and changing, which are derived from the current theme.

To apply a document theme:

Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme’

Select the theme you’d like to apply

Press ‘Ok’

To create a document theme

Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme → Add’

From here you can define colours for each part of your document.

Multi-page Floating Tables in Writer

This new feature is a combination of two existing capabilities. Multi-page tables and floating tables. Multi-page tables are tables than span their content over more than one page. Floating tables are tables inside a floating frame. This allows you to wrap text around them, which is particularly useful for brochures. Previously, it was not possible to combine these two features.

Floating frames used to work only on a single page. Now you can create floating tables that span across multiple pages. It improves interoperability with Microsoft’s OOXML format. It also significantly improves interoperability with tables that have been accidentally floated by users in Microsoft Office – often by just adjusting table sizing and positioning. This is frequently a problem in mis-designed Government forms – where tables are used for rendering borders, these should render and be editable with this update.

If you are interested in the complex technical challenges behind this feature, we encourage you to take a look into the series of posts by developer Miklos Vajna. There’s also a very insightful talk presented at COOL Days 2023 on YouTube. This feature is is still under active development, with some minor issues on specific use-cases to be ironed out, but you can make use of it in COOL 23.05 now.

Compact View of Pivot Tables

Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. Collabora Online can create and import Pivot Tables. The feature had first been introduced to Online in early 2021 together with numerous statistical tools. Meanwhile, the feature has seen further interoperability improvements. Collabora Online Calc is now able to preserve the more recent Excel default of compact Pivot Tables created in Excel. In addition to the more accurate visual representation, this improvement also avoids incorrect cell references.

Multi-Stop Gradients

Exciting improvements have been made to the under-the-hood renderer! Our rendering engine has been enhanced and can now handle even more complex gradients. You can now turn up the visual appeal of your document by incorporating multi-stop gradients into shapes, borders, and other elements. This update is essential for anyone who works with intricate graphics – bringing improvements and better interoperability for existing documents and making it easier to collaborate on more complex designs and graphics.

Improved Frame Anchoring and Position

COOL 23.05 includes improved compatibility with older document-framing descriptions including better positioning for frame handling, better support for combining/splitting frames and overlapping frames, fixes to some cases where parent styles were ignored, and fixes to avoid UI anchor changes that caused movement on the page.

64-bit Zip Support

The Zip64 standard extends numerous internal limitations in the XLSX and ODS formats used to compress documents. While the old zip limitations are enough for most practical user cases, documents with enormous amounts of content embedded could occasionally run into such limits. With support for Zip64 included in 23.05, editing and working with huge spreadsheets is now possible in Collabora Online. Zip64 also serves as a replacement – replacing the older standard for smaller files.

Zip64 support makes for exciting news for all, whether you’re a pro handling massive documents or a casual user who will surely benefit from the interoperability improvements! Everyone can expect improvements across the board.

Usability

Page Navigation

Page navigation plays a crucial role in enhancing the user experience, especially when creating large documents in Writer. It allows users to move seamlessly between sections, structure their documents and find the content they are searching for easily within complex documents.

The existing navigator functionality will now be viewable in the sidebar, allowing you to jump to each section by simply double clicking the headings. You can find this by clicking ‘View → Navigator’ and it will appear in the sidebar. From here you can jump to headings, tables, images, hyperlinks and more.

Simple Page Number Insertion

A wizard dialogue box has been added, combining inserting the required headers, footers, and page number fields into a single, easy to use, familiar dialog for users.

This features all the common alignment options, support for a variety of languages, and a preview.

Simply select ‘Insert → Page Numbers’ and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers. There are a variety of supported languages available including Asian and Cyrillic styles.

To remove page numbers, simply delete the page number in one of the footers and it will remove the page numbers on all pages.

Impress Hidden Slides

Impress introduces a new feature. Now a user can hide and show slides on the Slide Pane by right clicking and choosing ‘Hide Slide’ or ‘Show Slide’. They will then shown or hidden throughout the full screen presentation.

Core New Features Introduced in 22.05 Updates

Since the major release of COOL 22.05 in June 2022, many new features have been introduced throughout the year. These have had extensive testing and are now officially core features of Collabora Online 23.05.

Improved Hyperlink Pop-ups

The Collabora Online UI sees constant updates, improving the experience based on user feedback. One of the obvious changes can be seen in the way hyperlinks are handled in documents. Now, when clicking on a hyperlink, a small pop-up dialog appears, allowing several options. You can click the URL to follow the link (a pop-up will warn you, if you are leaving for an external page), you can copy the link, edit or delete it. The new and improved hyperlink pop-ups are available for all modules of Collabora Online and do significantly improve the handling of links – especially inside spreadsheets.

In Nextcloud, you can also see a small link preview of the URL which can help when searching through links.

Reference Management and Bibliographic Data with Zotero

Zotero is an open-source reference management software allowing users to manage bibliographic data and related research materials. It allows users to share bibliography libraries and notes, choosing from different citation styles. Collabora Online can now browse all the existing records of one’s Zotero library, enabling users to insert, remove, and refresh references, citations, and notes or to automatically generate bibliographies. This makes Collabora Online an excellent solution for research and academia alike.

Users will need to enter a valid Zotero API key into their office settings, if you don’t see a setting there – why not encourage your integrator to add it: it should be easy. More details on the Zotero plug-in are available on our blog. We hope to see more Collabora Online integrators making this feature available soon.

AI Based Translations with DeepL

DeepL is a leading AI company based in Germany. It offers the DeepL Translator, a translation tool based on a machine learning model that is trained by a large team of linguists. The plug-in is connected to the DeepL API and makes these high-quality translations available directly in Collabora Online without having to leave the document you are working on. To make use of it, it will need to be configured inside coolwsd.xml. Find out more about it on our blog or in the Collabora Online SDK. Once the feature is enabled, translating text inside a Writer document is as easy as selecting it, clicking the “Translate” button and choosing the target language from dialog.

PDF & EPUB Export Options

Previously PDF was from exported with default settings from Writer. Now we have a tabbed dialog full of options, including accessibility, permissions, image quality and more. Similarly to PDF export, we enabled the EPUB export options dialog in Collabora Online. EPUB is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based e-book format.

Community

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Online code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice Technology upon which CODE and Collabora Online are built.

All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.

Typographical Editing

New optional hyphenation settings are available to give rules for adjusting text flow. You can now limit hyphenation within paragraphs, set a minimum word length for hyphenation and opt to not hyphenate the last word of a paragraph.

This work was done by László Németh, NISZ.

Change Tracking in Numbered Lists

When making changes within numbered lists, the numbering has now been fixed to show actual and original numbers within the document.

This work was done by László Németh, NISZ.

Table Style Design Support

You can now modify table styles and create new ones in Impress and Draw. Modified styles are saved into documents, and can be shared via templates. You can access this function by right-clicking on a design in the Table Design Sidebar panel.

This work was done by Maxim Monastirsky.

Other community wins include:

Improved positioning of glyphs
Easy sheet searching dialog in Calc
and many more commits from LibreOffice 7.4 and LibreOffice 7.5.

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Online empowers users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.

Collabora Online 23.05 is the latest enterprise release of our widely integrated, secure office suite. It is suitable for large-scale deployment and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates and the ability to help direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many other major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organisations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control of them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host COOL on your own hardware or integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty and GDPR compliance. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our Partner’s integrations and try an online demo. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner.

Get Collabora Online 23.05

How Collabora Online Makes GDPR Compliance Easy

19 July 202318 July 2023 Richard Brock Leave a comment

Is your online office suite state of the art?

What is the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the toughest privacy and security law in the world. Though it was drafted and passed by the European Union (EU), it imposes obligations onto organizations anywhere, so long as they target or collect data related to people in the EU. The regulation was put into effect on May 25, 2018. The GDPR will levy harsh fines against those who violate its privacy and security standards, with penalties reaching into the tens of millions of euros.

Well that sounds scary, but what does GDPR really mean for businesses and how they collect and store data? In this quick guide, we will explain what you need to know about GDPR with a focus on how it relates to services such as Office365, Google Docs and Collabora Online.

Under GDPR, if a data ‘controller’ (an organisation that collects any personal data) wants to share personal data with a third-party ‘processor’ (an organization that processes this data, for example Microsoft or Google), they must ensure that the third-party processor provides sufficient guarantees that they will implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect the personal data. Even without sharing with third parties, the controller must also show that when “taking into account state of the art” technology, they are incorporating data protection “by design and by default”.

And if all this seems very abstract, it might be worth considering according to German legal firm CMS, there have been over 1,600 fines issued in the last five years, with the average fine a little over €2,400,000. These range from headline grabbing figures for Meta and Amazon, to hundreds and thousands of euros for small and medium businesses, hospitals, government administrations and other companies dotted around the world with European users. After removing the 45 individual fines over 1 million euros for this period, we calculate the average fine comes out at more than €300,000. Got your attention yet?

So what is “state of the art”, and “data protection by design and by default”. At Collabora, we believe the highest level of protection means having the strongest access control requirements, and for this, no-one else does or can do better.

Where is your data?

As technology and the internet has developed, file sharing and collaborative working have become vital for anyone trying to run an efficient business, or even just set a monthly budget or write a letter. We send files in email attachments, in messaging apps, through different file sharing websites, or on a USB stick. We know that there are bad actors ‘out there’, but as long as nothing happens to us, we try not to think about it too much.

The internet is a scary place if you’re on your own

But clearly this is not “state of the art”. The internet is a scary place, and if your data is out in the open like this, anyone could access it.

End to end encryption

Most businesses and applications however recognise the issue here, and the current received wisdom is that ‘end-to-end encryption’ will save the day. To offer you a quick refresher – the general idea with end-to-end encryption is that in order to prevent someone reading a letter who shouldn’t have access, the sender puts a padlock on their letter before putting it in the post, which is then unlocked upon arrival by the recipient. Postman Pat and the rest of the delivery company have no idea what was in the letter, everybody is happy. Sounds good right?

Yet there is an obvious issue staring us in the face with this methodology – it is only end-to-end. A well-intentioned attempt to keep corrupt postmen or system administrators away from your letters or stored data perhaps, but in terms of keeping your data safe in the wider scheme of things, utterly useless! As anyone who’s ever misplaced a letter, had someone read over their shoulder, or indeed had their house broken into can attest to. Where either end might be, who or what is going on there is literally anyone’s guess. End to end encryption also means – you can kiss goodbye to any guarantees of having a malware free server, you certainly can’t scan for viruses anymore or respond fully to a lawful freedom of information request. Nevermind the security implications of what happens when you or one of your staff leaves an ‘end’ with confidential data on it in a bar or taxi or train by mistake. The British government alone reported a total of “96 laptops, tablets, smartphones and other devices lost by or stolen from parliamentary staffers between January 2019 and December 2020, with one device disappearing within Downing Street itself”.

End-to-end encryption, then what?

As far as mitigating this issue goes, companies are left up the creek and without a paddle by this approach. Company laptops are issued that must themselves be encrypted to hopefully secure that end if it is ever lost, and personal laptops are banned, or further lengthy BYOD policies enacted with spurious levels of enforcement.

In the same way that welding your front door shut but leaving the window open is hardly safe, it’d be difficult to honestly argue that this is “data protection by design and by default”. In fact this lack of clarity over what happens at the server ‘end’ is precisely why the German and French governments are taking action to ban some public services from using Office 365 or Google Workspace.

Look, but don’t touch!

So must we accept our valuable data can never be truly safe? We don’t think so! The British Crown Jewels are estimated to be worth upwards of £3 billion. They have lived in the Tower of London since 1661, guarded by the British Army, rarely leaving the premises, yet they have been open to public viewing for most of this time. Within the castle grounds they are viewed by 2-3 million visitors every year, and the only attempted theft ended in failure in 1671. Perhaps our modern collaborative working arrangements could learn something from this open, but secure setup. Is there a way to enable users to view documents, without them leaving the safety of the castle? To look, but not touch?

Well, it turns out there is! While it may well be impractical to start your own international parcel delivery company, it turns out there’s very little stopping a company, individual or organisation from hosting their data within their own premises (be it office or castle!), or with a trusted Collabora partner, essentially running the data-delivery company yourself, and crucially with Collabora Online, sending only images of the viewed parts of the document (not the complete file) to the end users, giving as much or as little editing access as they see fit. Operating more like a hyper-efficient remote desktop than a browser-based editor, user activity is processed by the server in real time, meaning the actual file data never leaves the safety of the server, so no amount of malicious malware, technical tomfoolery or pernicious postmen can extract it from a browser or device. Lost your company laptop? Who cares?! There is no company data on it anyway, and before any bad actors even start looking up your mother’s maiden name, your childhood best friend and what street you grew up on, with a click of a mouse, you can make sure your castle server never communicates with it ever again. Remote wipe if you feel like it, but there’s really nothing on the device!

Collaborative data protection by design and by default

You should use the state of the art solution

If that’s not data protection by design and by default, using state of the art technology, then we don’t know what is. It also remains very unclear how any other software provider intends to honestly address the pressing issue of data security or GDPR compliance, as evidenced by weekly reports of leaks and fines. Don’t sweep the problem under someone else’s rug, be state of the art with Collabora Online and take control of your data.

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Six Reasons Why Collabora Online is the Best Microsoft Office Alternative

12 July 202312 July 2023 Richard Brock 2 Comments

Microsoft Office has led the office productivity market for many years, but is now no longer the only option for your online document editing. Collabora Online is perfect for businesses who are looking for a modern and secure workspace.

Here are six reasons why Collabora Online is the best Microsoft Office alternative:

1. Excellent interoperability with major (and minor) file formats

If you can’t work with the files, then you aren’t much use as a file editor. Fortunately Collabora Online provides excellent interoperability with a wide range of file formats. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, we’ve got you covered. In actual fact, we have greater interoperability between our online and offline editor than even Microsoft’s desktop and online editors offer (more about this coming in a future post, watch this space!). So rest assured, you’ll still have access to that legacy Microsoft Works file you still have lying around. Got an unusual client who likes everything sent to them in .docm? Not a problem. Need to import a FlatXML spreadsheet? With Collabora Online, you’ll have all the interoperability you need for your modern, or indeed legacy working environment!

2. Digital security and sovereignty

Collabora Online offers distinct advantages over Microsoft Office from a digital sovereignty perspective. First and foremost, Collabora Online is an open-source solution, providing transparency and giving organizations full control over their software stack. This allows users to verify and modify the source code, ensuring data privacy and security. Additionally, unlike Office 365 which operates on a cloud infrastructure managed by a single provider, Collabora Online can be deployed on-premise or in a private cloud, enabling organizations to maintain complete sovereignty over their data. This level of control enables full compliance with data protection regulations and safeguards against unauthorised access. By choosing Collabora Online, you can prioritise your digital autonomy and protect your data.

3. Collaborate effectively with anyone you chose

The clue’s in the name! Collabora Online allows you to collaborate, co-edit, review and track changes, add comments, and share your documents securely. Furthermore, Collabora Online gives you a whole range of security and permission settings, enforced server side, to ensure your data and the content of your documents, is always protected.

4. Great platform availability and ease of use

Whether you’re a Mac, Windows or Linux user, or you like to edit on desktop, mobile or your favourite modern browser, Collabora Online is available to offer you freedom of choice. Also, unlike the familiar alternatives, our browser-based and desktop applications have full interoperability since they share a common codebase. No more glitches when you try and edit that slide show online that you just had on your laptop.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and with Collabora Online you won’t have to. With a familiar user-friendly interface, you’ll feel right at home and can skip costly retraining that might come with other alternatives.

5. No more vendor lock-in

Have you noticed the inexorable rise of Microsoft’s pricing structure, or new changes nobody asked for? We certainly have. Break free from vendor lock-in with Collabora Online! Unlike other tech giants, with Collabora Online you’re not tied to any one service provider. Integrate our secure office suite into your own solution and infrastructure, or with any of our 200+ partners, paying for as many services as you require. Want to switch to a hybrid cloud solution or fully on-premise down the line? Not an issue with Collabora Online.

6. Exciting Community Spirit

Did you know that by joining Collabora Online, you’re joining a huge community? Collabora Online was born out of the open-source world, long before crowdfunding or crowdsourcing was a thing, and we’ve stayed true to our roots. Alongside Collabora Online, we also offer Collabora Online Development Edition (or CODE for short) allowing everyone to enjoy the latest features and provide feedback. This vibrant and engaged community fosters a collaborative environment where users, developers, and enthusiasts come together to contribute, share knowledge, and drive the evolution of Collabora Online. The CODE community offers an opportunity to help others through forums, mailing lists, and dedicated channels. Furthermore, this community-driven ecosystem provides opportunity for contribution to the enhancement and expansion of Collabora Online’s features, compatibility and performance, giving you access to a support network and bespoke solutions Microsoft Office users can only dream of.

We could go on, but suspect you’re getting the message. Collabora Online is the best alternative to Microsoft Office, and if you ask us, is better than the current market leaders. Try the demo today at: https://col.la/getonline

Free Collabora Online Demo

How To Keep Your Business Data Secure

6 July 202318 July 2023 Richard Brock Leave a comment

Free Codes on Tilt Shift Lens Stock Photo

Long gone are the days when all you needed was a good safe and perhaps some security personnel to keep your business data secure. With the advent of modern computing and online file sharing, the Pandora’s box of data security has been flung open, and the lid appears to be hanging from the hinges.

A quick search will reveal news stories of banks, credit agencies, hotels, hospitals, supermarkets, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and most recently the US Department of Defence suffering significant data breaches. Embarrassing at best, often resulting in further financial crime and fraud, and in the last case, potentially life threatening.

So where does that leave the rest of us? Is there any hope of getting the leaking data-security curse back into the box? Let’s go through three key principles needed to keep your data safe and secure.

Host it Locally

Free Code Projected Over Woman Stock Photo

As the adage goes, if you want a job done well, do it yourself, and one way to enhance data security is to host your data on-premise, or with a trusted local hoster. This means that instead of using nebulous cloud-based services with vague guarantees and/or jurisdictional boundaries, you can store your data on servers that are physically located within your own business premises, or with a provider who can give straightforward answers to your security questions. This is preferable for a number of reasons, including:

i. Increased control and flexibility:

When you host your data on-premise or in your locality, you have more control over your data. You don’t have to rely on a third party to manage your data for you. This means you can choose your own hardware and software, and configure your system to meet your specific needs. Alternatively in cooperation with a trusted provider you can find a hybrid cloud solution, leveraging their expertise to find the perfect solution for you. For a small business, this could be a very simple setup without compromising on security, then scaling with size, the system and security measures can be adapted accordingly to ensure that your data is always protected.

ii. A more secure environment:

Hosting data on-premise creates the most compliant environment for your data. With most cloud providers, it is very unclear who might have access to you data, an issue which has led the French and German governments to ban the use of Office365 and Google Workspace in schools due to a lack of clarity over which jurisdiction the student data will ever be in. But if you have physical control over your servers, you can implement security measures that are difficult, or impossible, to achieve with cloud-based services, doing away with regulatory, or even legal issues that may arise from a nebulous cloud. For those with the most stringent of security requirements, private networks can even be configured to detect newly connected unauthorised devices, immediately alerting you, or even setting off physical alarm bells if you should so choose (we all like a bit of drama!).

Go Open Source

As mentioned above, the problem the French and German governments had with Google and Microsoft was a lack of clarity about how and where data is being processed, and to what extent it is accessible to other parties (foreign governments, the service provider themselves, etc). This problem is inherent in any closed-source proprietary software.

With an open-sourced product hosted locally however, there can be no secret back doors, super users, master keys, or hidden access to developers or governments. You can have both global collaboration and indigenous software under your regulatory control. Don’t take our word for it – have a look yourself! Furthermore, open-source software tends to be less expensive than proprietary software, and often of better quality. This is because the source code can be freely reviewed and improved by any developer, bringing together a body of knowledge and ideas far greater than any one private company could ever assemble. Similarly, bugs and security vulnerabilities are likely to be discovered and fixed more quickly than with proprietary software.

One further advantage of open-source software is that it brings greater flexibility and control, whereby any user may modify the software to meet their specific needs, or customise it to integrate with other software and systems they may be using, which brings us to our last point.

Secure View

No matter how much security you may have, a chain is no stronger than it’s weakest link, which in many cases may not be electronic, but your employees or clients. All businesses want to be able to easily share documents both internally amongst fellow staff members and externally with partners and other valued third-parties. Crucially, though, they don’t want to lose control of these documents, as was the case with the most recent Pentagon leak, where an employee was able to simply print entire documents, and upload copies to the internet anonymously.

Free A Man and a Woman Working Together Stock Photo Collabora Secure View was developed at the request of a leading car manufacturer to solve this problem. Rather than sending full document files to an end-user, it sends pre-rendered pixels to their screen. Downloading, copying and printing can be fully disabled, with policy enforced server-side, and no amount of trickery can extract your original documents against your policy. The document can even be further watermarked with the user’s login information ensuring that they are unable to share a screenshot without identifying themselves.

In this way, companies are able to share confidential pre-release information widely without fear of leaks, receiving valuable feedback from internal staff and users, whilst still keeping everything under wraps before the big release, or in more serious cases guarding against corporate espionage.

This is only a quick overview, but unlike the Greek myth where Pandora was unable to return the curses unleashed on the world, we’re confidant that the data-security box can be safely and securely closed. If you’d like to find out more about how Collabora Online can help you keep your data your own, get in touch at hello@collaboraoffice.com.