COOL Days meetup in Berlin – community team building & partner day (October 3, 4 & 5)

 

We are glad to announce that our next Collabora Productivity meetup for 2022 will be on October 3, October 4 and October 5 in Berlin, Germany.

There are some special events prepared for our partners and customers where you will hear about the latest work in Collabora Online and Office, be able to give your input to help develop our road map, meet the engineers and see how you can become part of the project, all while having fun with the Collabora team!

We have prepared three days with activities in Berlin, Germany – you just need to book your flight and join us! We will meet on October 3, with our first activity starting at 10am.

Collabora Community Team Building Day – October 3

We have prepared a day of awesome and unique activities for our partners and customers in Berlin.

10:00 – 12:30 – Computer Games Museum

Experience 60 years of gaming history and culture. The Computerspielemuseum contains over 300 exhibits, including rare originals, playable classics, and more!

We will meet at the Computerspielemuseum between 10 and 10.30am for 2 hours of retro gaming fun!

13:00 – Lunch & Indoor Skydiving at Windobona

Ever wanted to skydive? Now’s your chance!

  • An unforgettable experience with guidance from fully-certified instructors.
  • Open to everyone, whether you’re a first-timer or a pro!
  • Reach speeds of up to 180 km/h and imagine how it would feel to jump out of a real plane.
  • Spread your wings inside the 4.3m wide, 17m high, glazed flight chamber.
  • The indoor skydiving centre is located in the centre of the city and is easily accessible by public transport.

If you need to pay for these events yourself, please let us know – and significant others may also be included.

Collabora Partner Day & Hackfest – October 4

On October 4 our wonderful development community has a great opportunity to meet up, catch up, and work on problems together in-person at the bUm thanks to Nextcloud.

Meanwhile – we will have our Partner Day – this will take place at the Alexander Plaza Hotel – located in the centre of the city and is invitation only. Please send an e-mail to book a place before they’re all gone! (More booking info at the end.)

Program of the Business Day

Full details below – subject to change. All times displayed are CEST (UTC+2)

Time Topic Type By
09:30 Welcome to COOL Days Partner Day Opening Naomi Obbard
09:35 Digital Sovereignty: Building a Sustainable Marketing Strategy Strategy Peter Ganten, CEO Univention
10:20 Ensuring Digital Sovereignty with COOL Business Benefits Eloy Crespo
10:40 Ensuring Data Security with COOL Security Miklos Vajna
11:00 Break
11:30 Making Sense of the Last 2 Years: Collabora Online as a Response to the Mega-Trends of the 20’s Keynote Michael Meeks
12:00 Ensuring Covid Resilience with COOL Integration/Features Jan Holesovsky
12:20 Roadmap – Presentation & Discussion Talk/Discussion Michael Meeks
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Executive Round Table including Q&A Panel/Discussion
15:00 Brief Partner updates Feedback Partners
16:00 Wrap-up Close
16:15 Networking until dinner

There will be plenty of opportunity to find out more information on what Collabora is doing and where we are heading. You will also be able to meet the engineers and ask any questions. And of course, we will have snacks, drinks and lunch waiting for you there.

COOL Days “Technical day” – October 5

On October 5 we will have our Technical Day – the event will take place at the bUm.

This day is focused on providing the latest updates about our development, and we will have a whole round of lightning talks from our technical team and community. Come and listen to the latest from our top engineers and contributors about all the most important technical developments and challenges around Collabora Online. We will also have snacks and drinks waiting for you there.

Program of the Technical Day

Full details below – subject to change. All times displayed are CEST (UTC+2)

Time Topic By
10:00 Welcome to COOL Days Technical Day
10:10 (JS)Dialogs Conversion Status Szymon Klos
10:20 NextCloud Office Raul & Julius from NextCloud
10:30 DeepL Mert Tümer
10:40 Faster zstd Tiles Thanks to Facebook Michael Meeks
10:50 Design Improvements Pedro Silva
11:00 Break
11:30 PDF Export Mert Tümer
11:40 Re-vamped Save As Mert Tümer
11:50 Async Saving Cleanups Ash Nakashian
12:00 COOL Kubernetes Pranam Lashkari
12:10 Content Controls Miklos Vajna
12:20 Sparklines and Chart Data Tables Tomaz Vajngerl
12:30 Remote Control Configuration Rashesh Padia
12:40 iOS Improvements Tor Lillqvist
12:50 EGroupware and COOL Integration Birgit Becker
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Streaming Document Deltas Michael Meeks
14:10 Accessibility Checker Tomaz Vajngerl
14:20 Calc Formula Bar Szymon Klos
14:30 Tips on Debugging COOL Andras Timar
14:40 How to Use COOL Inside VNC Lagoon Andrea Wörrlein from VNC
14:50 Video Embedding Ash Nakashian
15:00 COOL and 1&1 Gabriel
15:10 Interoperability Improvements Gülşah Köse
15:20 Multi-host Configuration Jan Holesovsky
15:30 Giant Spreadsheets in Online Luboš Luňák
15:40 Using Cypress for Testing a Presentation Exported in SVG Marco Cecchetti
15:50 COOL Fonts Tor
16:00 File Properties Nick Wingate
16:10 LanguageTool Mert Tümer
16:20 Getting Involved and Overview of COOL Community Pedro Silva
16:30 Close

Get your ticket NOW to reserve your space!

Send an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com as soon as possible to get your name on our VIP list, as there is a limited number of places.

Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information or travel details.

In addition, if you’d like to give a ~five-minute lightning talk, send us an e-mail with Talk: in the subject line so we can arrange a slot for you.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Join us at the OW2con’19 in Paris!

 

On June 12th and 13th, the OW2con 2019 will take place in Paris, France. The central theme of OW2con this year is: “Open Source: Toward Industry Maturity”. OW2con’19 is the annual open source event that brings together the OW2 community, technology experts, software architects, IT project managers and decision-makers from around the world.

During the OW2con’19, Collabora Productivity’s General Manager Michael Meeks and our valued French partner Arawa will there to talk about the improvements and benefits of Collabora Online – your own private office suite in the cloud. Join us at the OW2con’19 and learn more about open source and the Collabora Online development!

Collabora Online is an on-premise open source software component based on LibreOffice, that can be easily integrated into any web application, and which enables viewing and collaborative editing of Office documents in dozens of file formats. This provides an easy-to-deploy office suite that runs directly in any modern browser, on any device.

Try Collabora Online

 

The built-in Redaction tool in Collabora Office is here!

What is Redaction and why it is useful?

Redaction tool is a software feature which allows users to redact documents and to block out words or portions of a document according to rules for authorized use or viewing.

The aim of this tool is to protect sensitive information and help enterprises and other groups to comply with regulations, such as GDPR, for a given industry or a type of document.

Note: you might be interested in the later added feature Automatic Redaction too.

Redaction tool helps to make certain kinds of tedious data entry or alteration easier, and to provide more comprehensive and consistent methods for safeguarding sensitive data in documents. This has become very important in many types of industries, such as Pharmaceutical / Medical, Health or Finance / Banking / Insurance/ Legal.

Now, with Collabora Office, you have the opportunity to use this practical tool with lots of improvements.

How this works on paper ?

Amazingly, even in 2019 people are still printing their electronic documents. Manually redacting them with a black pen, photocopying them, and then re-redacting the photocopies in the same places with a pen (and sometimes re-photocopying) – to ensure that no trace of the original is present. It seems amazing to sit next to a powerful computer that can easily do this while manually using a pen, paper and photocopier to achieve the result. Surely there must be a better way:

How can I start using built-in Redaction?

    1. Open a document in Collabora Office.
    2. Click Tools – Redact from the main menu, and wait while your document is being prepared for redaction.

    1. Notice your document is now loaded in an adapted ‘Draw’ view.
    2. Do the redaction by using the “Rectangle Redaction”, and the “Freeform Redaction” tools on the “Redaction Toolbar”

    1. Notice the redaction rectangles are semi-transparent in this version to help you while you edit and position them
    2. Save & share the in-redaction copies of the document with peers either in the modifiable (odg) or the verbatim (pdf) format at your option.

      • For saving a modifiable copy, you may simply click File – Save from the main menu.
      • The Direct Export to PDF button allows the user to take an in-redaction copy of the document in PDF to share as a verbatim copy for review.
    3. Once you are ready to finalize the redaction, click the desired option on the “Redacted Export” tool on the Redaction toolbar. Then load up your document in your
      favorite PDF viewer to check

Can I be sure my data is really gone ?

It is important to be confident in this. There are a large number of obvious problems with redacted documents. It is important to ensure that data is not left in the PDF underneath.
While there are many cleverer ways of doing the redaction, and there is some sacrifice in copy/paste-ability for non-redacted text – we chose to export PDFs that contain simple, flat images on each page. If you can’t see the pixels you don’t want – the data is simply not there. So yes, you can be really confident that your data is not present.

Which are the most important improvements?

This development work is ongoing, and has been provided to our customers as we go along.
Recent improvements include:

  • Handle other page sizes than A4
  • Direct PDF export in the Redaction toolbar
  • Make white rectangles the default to save toner
  • Protect page position during redaction
  • Enable redaction for Impress

Want to start using the Redaction tool?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now!

Try Unstable Snapshot

Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too.

 

For more information:

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

“Real Time, Secure Collaboration” presentation at Nextcloud Enterprise 2019!

On March 12th, Nextcloud held their annual Enterprise Day in the Congress Centrum Liederhalle in the center of Stuttgart, Germany. Participants enjoyed a day of strategic sessions, presentations, learning from different enterprise case studies and best practices on the Nextcloud platform.

During the Nextcloud Enterprise Day, Collabora Productivity’s General Manager Michael Meeks gave a talk about how Collabora Online integrates into Nextcloud.

Collabora Online is an on-premise open source software component based on LibreOffice, that can be easily integrated into any web application, and which enables viewing and collaborative editing of Office documents in dozens of file formats. This provides an easy-to-deploy office suite that runs directly in any modern browser, on any device.

Slides

Check out the slides above for the complete presentation:

 

Download presentation in PDF (5.1 MB)

Try Collabora Online in Nextcloud

 

Collabora Online 4.0.3 Released

Cambridge, United Kingdom, March 26, 2019Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, is excited to announce a new release of our enterprise product Collabora Online 4.0.3. This release comes with lots of bugfixes and a few minor new features.

What’s new in Collabora Online 4.0.3?

New features

  • Follow other editor behavior: we now show the flag with the suer name above the other users’ caret when they are typing or moving around in the document. When the other user stops interacting, the flag fades away after a second or two.

  • In impress – we added keyboard bindings to allow switching slides with up/down arrow keys when the slide pane is focused.
  • The Help URL is now configurable in /etc/lookitconfig.xcu and when the URL is unset, the Help buttons inside dialogs are hidden.
  • MPLv2 code subset configuration is now built by default.
  • Restored sort buttons to the toolbar in Calc – present in 3.4, and back by popular request in 4.0.3.

Notable bugfixes

  • In some circumstances the convert-to folder could become filled with documents – we made the cleanup of in-progress conversions much more robust.
  • When no avatar is available – we now show user colors:
  • Do not disable the Close Document menu for read-only docs

  • Last modification link should lead to revision history only when revision history feature is enabled
  • Show a normal statusbar in narrow window
  • Localization fixes
  • Fix Save As when ‘%’ character is used within the filename
  • Disable Thesaurus menu, when thesaurus is not available
  • Fix a crash, when trying to accept changes
  • Fix a crash, that occurred when no spelling dictionaries were available
  • Make PDF exported watermarks (when printing) look more similar to the watermarks shown in the online editor – when tiles are watermarked.
  • Fix rare corner-cases where under heavy load, concurrent editors may have had their changes attributed to other users.

Getting Collabora Online 4.0.3

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 our home page for 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 Enteprise 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.

Online demo

You 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 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.