In the aftermath of this year’s LibreOffice conference, we are glad to provide you with the latest update of our LibreOffice growth infoGraphic, including beautiful visuals and interesting numbers! We do hope you appreciate it and would love to hear your feedback. And of course, it is great if you find the format, in which it is presented, convenient to share.
Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic in general, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Although the total number of contributions to the LibreOffice core has slightly dropped compared to the year before, our developers remain top code contributors to LibreOffice with 4188 code commits (32.3%). The popular Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE), for home use & small teams, saw over 70 million Docker image pulls! We are glad to acknowledge, that the move of Collabora Online to GitHub has resulted in an increased number of contributions from the community. We are truly grateful to the growing number of partners, customers and volunteers for making this work possible.
The number of worldwide Collabora Online partners has raised to 230, the Collabora Office app for Android, iOS and Chrome OS saw 500,000 installations and the last year’s joint online conference by LibreOffice and SUSE did welcome over 130 participants from all over the world.
Would you like to see some previous versions of the info graph? Please find them here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016.
So, without further ado, please have a look at the updated LibreOffice growth infoGraphic on 2021 here:
Hamburg, Germany – Cambridge, United Kingdom – August 25, 2021 – Collabora, the driving force behind creating ‘Collabora Online’, and allotropia software, an IT service company that specializes in free and open source technologies (FLOSS), are proud to announce a partnership around Collabora Online.
“We are excited to have allotropia as our partner,” said Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. “We love their work, enjoy contributing together, and see this partnership as a natural extension of our long term collaboration.”
“We are delighted to be able to offer Collabora Online as part of our services around the larger FLOSS office workplace solutions” said Thorsten Behrens, founder and CEO at allotropia. “With the rich editing and collaboration features in Collabora Online, we can deliver great LibreOffice Technology based value to our customers.”
allotropia provides innovative open source solutions for the digital collaboration age. Our customers value sovereignty over their data, and love the way Open Source software enables them to innovate with agency. Adding Collabora Online to our portfolio is the ideal addition, with highly compatible migration paths into hybrid and fully web-based product development.
Collabora Online is the powerful LibreOffice-based online office that supports all major documents, spreadsheets and presentation file formats, which can all be easily integrated in many infrastructures and solutions. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file formatting support. Collabora Online is excellent for enterprises that need a powerful office suite in the Cloud, or on-premises, that protects their privacy and allows them to keep full control of their sensitive corporate data. Collabora Online enables Hosting and Cloud businesses to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offerings.
Collabora Online can also be used in combination with our PC based office suites: Collabora Office, as well as natively on iOS, Android and ChromeOS. This gives organizations flexibility to choose where to run their Office workloads, without being forced to use third party servers.
About Collabora Productivity
Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online and is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud. Collabora provides a wide range of products, as well as consulting services for enterprises and governments. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora 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 support. Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS and Android. 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 www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.
About allotropia
The company allotropia software GmbH provides services, consulting and products around LibreOffice and related opensource projects. Founded in 2020 with 5 long-time developers of the project, its stated mission is to make LibreOffice shine – in as many different shapes and forms as necessary to serve modern needs towards office productivity software.
Allotropia software GmbH is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany at the birthplace of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice code and project. For more information, visit allotropia.de or follow @allotropiaEN on Twitter.
Collabora Online 6.4.10 introduces important improvements, in the areas of usability, visual presentation and performance. These can make your work faster and smoother and reduce server load too. CODE and Collabora Online have a unique WYSIWYG experience, unmatched by others, which now also adds visual anchors for precise positioning of images and objects in Writer, PPTX interoperability improvements and more pleasant scrolling of PDF files. Try it and share your experience!
A milestone in performance for online collaboration
The performance of Collabora Online is continually improving, particularly for larger groups working on documents, while we also grow our feature set in parallel. This version of CODE comes with a set of significant performance wins. Of a long list, let us mention the following.
With a heavily loaded document store – auto-saving of the document could in some circumstances block document editing while autosave was underway. Dealing with the document store on save is now done asynchronously, ie. in the background for a smoother experience.
The squiggly red-line used to highlight of misspelled words was consuming lots of rendering time which has now been fixed.
Memory handling of messages was less optimal than it could be.
The JavaScript in the browser client has a large number of improvements.
JavaScript image encoding is optimized and no longer touches large amounts of memory.
The document is no longer re-rendered in the browser for every websocket message from the server: instead batching message processing to improve responsiveness and avoid lagginess.
JavaScript and grid line rendering performance in Calc have also been improved.
Some 6.4.10 enhancements in the server back end and improvements for profiling & debugging.
A new built-in end-to-end profiler helps to find performance bottlenecks.
The ability to enable trace logging for a specific document on a busy server allows problems with individual documents to be diagnosed without having an adverse impact on whole server performance.
Of course, we could explain many technical details around Unix Socket buffers, image caching, sharing string memory and so forth. But we suggest that people who understand that, may want to engage with the cool_dev community and get involved with the fun!
We’re pleased to bring all these improvements to our users, and we are already working on new wins for future releases. Nevertheless, we think this new version of CODE is a milestone on the way to the slickest editing experience for all! We grateful to community members who have helped to report and improve things in this area.
Consistent and beautiful interface that makes working more fun
CODE 6.4.10 comes with many improvements that enhance usability and makes the application visual more attractive. We would like to highlight the following examples:
Click to enlarge: The Find & Replace button is now available in the Home tab of Writer in CODE 6.4.10
Dialog showing copy & paste shortcuts, and warning information around pasting content, are now consistent and in a clear style.
The NotebookBar has its spacing optimized, and is a few pixels smaller
Usability of the NotebookBar has been improved by promoting some items to big buttons
In Writer, the Find & Replace button added to the Home tab
Some obsolete buttons have been removed (e.g. the Thesaurus from the NotebookBar in Calc)
The box to change the document name has been reworked and is now easier to work with
The dialog Help > About and Help > Keyboard shortcuts are improved: users will no longer close them accidentally. In addition, it is now possible to copy the content.
The search toolbar at the bottom now gives clearer feedback when a search text is not found. Earlier that was hard to notice.
Spreadsheet tabs are more distinct with added contrast and multiple cosmetic fixes.
The spreadsheet tabs’ context menu only shows the options that are relevant when eg. there is only one sheet.
Various close buttons and other icons have improved positioning.
The settings in the CSV Import dialog are better positioned and easier to use, and horizontal scrolling through columns is enabled.
After inserting a shape or a table, the NotebookBar will switch to the Draw tab or Table tab
Click to enlarge: Many usability improvements in help menus of CODE 6.4.10
You can find more details on UI improvements in our release notes.
Interoperability improved with headers and footers in PPTX presentations
Headers and footers in PPTX presentations can now be edited online, further improving the WYSIWYG experience and also interoperability with other applications. The functionality can be accessed via the Header & Footer button at the Insert tab. The header function in Impress is reserved for the notes and handouts. Footers can be used on slides. In the dialog the Footer and Header text is defined. Other adjustments, such as font, colour and position, can be done via the master slide. These are features that users are familiar with from desktop applications as Collabora Office, which had a new major release recently.
Object and image anchors in text documents
An image or shape in Writer now can show its anchor point when selected. This makes it easier to position objects: the anchor point is clear and the anchor can be dragged with the mouse. Of course an image or shape can be anchored “as character” and be the anchor itself. The anchoring options can be altered via the context menu. Collabora Online offers users a unique WYSIWYG experience, working with either Microsoft DOCX or OpenDocument ODT, with a depth of functionality and detail that is unmatched.
Smooth & slick PDF scrolling
When opening PDF documents in online, it is now easy to scroll through them smoothly. In contrast to their previous rendering as one page at a time, now it is possible to read PDFs like Writer documents: continuously.
CODE 6.4.10: It is now possible to scroll smoothly through PDF files instead of browsing them page per page.
With CODE, you always run the latest features in online collaboration and interoperability. We hope you like this new release as much as we do! It’s easy to get involved: do share your experiences – we love to hear your feedback. Finally, why not check-out the developer resources on GitHub and get involved.
About CODE
CODE is the Collabora Online Development Edition. It contains the latest developments and is perfect for home users. It enables them to regain control of their own online documents and to host them themselves in a secure and private environment. For tech-enthusiasts, it is a low-threshold way to get involved and familiar with our online office solution. CODE will be improved continuously and our next supported and maintained Collabora Online product will be built from it. All of our code is Open Source, and a vibrant community in participating in growing Collabora Online. Would you like to be part of the story? Join the community!
All you need to deploy Collabora Online on your Kubernetes setup, is applying these configuration settings on your installation of Collabora Online.
Install Collabora Online on Kubernetes in 3 easy steps
With the increasing use of the Kubernetes, we are happy to provide an easy way to deploy our online on your Kubernetes setup.
Thanks to Collabora developer lpranam, Collabora Online can be setup with Kubernetes and also a key feature such as collaborative editing will work correctly. Therefore it is vital to ensure that all users editing the same document end up being served by the same pod. Using the WOPI protocol, the http/https URL includes a unique identifier (WOPISrc) for use with that document. Thus load balancing can be done by using WOPISrc – ensuring that all URLs that contain the same WOPISrc are sent to the same pod. We use a reverse proxy to achieve this load balancing mechanism. HAProxy provides the easiest way to achieve all are requirements for this setup.
The following steps may vary a little according to your cloud providers. Here we demonstrate how to access the online with a minikube setup on a local machine.
HAproxy is installed as a NodePort service so to access any service through HAProxy we can use the node’s ip.
To get your node ip with minikube minikube ip
example output
192.168.0.106
2. Each container port is mapped to a NodePort port via the Service object. To find those ports
kubectl get svc --namespace=haproxy-controller
example output
In this instance, the following ports were mapped:
Container port 80 to NodePort 30536
Container port 443 to NodePort 31821
Container port 1024 to NodePort 30480
3. Now in this case to make our hostname available we have to add the following line into /etc/hosts:
192.168.0.106 loolwsd.public.example.com
Feedback and community
If you have feedback, or want to get involved somehow: here’s our cool-dev community!
A limitation with the import of XML files is removed. Previously XML tags/names with special characters (UTF-8) blocked importing and that works nicely now. You find this feature under Data > XML Source… .
Working on the next major release
Our engineers work hard on preparing the new major 21-version of Collabora Office, that will come with a whole lot of improvements and new features, with business support by the experts and with regular updates.
Do keep an eye on our announcements, or actually test the features with the Collabora Office 21 Snapshot.
Read all about the latest developments of Collabora’s business version of LibreOffice in the release notes. And the main 6.4 announcement; shows how Collabora Office helps to improve your control over documents and privacy.
