After a lot of encouraging feedback we received on the major 4.2.0 Online release, we’re happy to now announce the first update!
New Features
Context menu option to put a shape or image to the background of text on Writer. (Wrap → Wrap Through + In Background, Arrange → To Background and To Foreground)
Shape moved to the background of a Writer document. Click on the image to start animation!
Writer documents can be exported to EPUB format. Use File > Download as > EPUB (.epub)
This uses the default similar to File > Export As > Export Directly As EPUB in LibreOffice / Collabora Office.
Export as EPUB in Collabora Online!
Improved features
Consistent Calc formula bar focusing in all cases
Possibility to easily navigate across wide merged cells in Calc
You can use Table of Contents links in Writer document
Updated translations
Fixes
In some cases the font dropdown contained only 2 fonts instead of all fonts installed. This has been fixed
Search bar did not accept letter ‘r’. This has been fixed
Fixed slide reordering by drag-and-drop in Impress
Fixed printing in Internet Explorer 11
Collabora Online never supported opening .oxt files (LibreOffice extensions) and .odb files (LibreOffice database files). We removed these file types from WOPI discovery.xml
Fixed the z-index of some pop-up dialogs, e.g. the warning to exceeded document/connection limit dialog is visible again
Fixed download action when server is running with no capabilities
On CentOS 8, Ubuntu 18.04, and Debian 10, which have OpenSSL 1.1.1, now we link loolwsd with Poco 1.10.1. That solves SSL connection issues, e.g. connecting to sites that have certificates made with elliptic curve key
On some systems the “child-root” jails were not cleaned up after use. This has been fixed
4.2.0 information
Since this version is an update. you may be interested in the information on the major release 4.2.0.
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.
Cambridge,February 27th, 2020, 12:00 CET – Today we are releasing Collabora Office for Android and iOS which will allow you to edit documents directly on your phone or tablet, guaranteeing your privacy and putting you in full control of your data and documents. This release fully integrates the iOS and Android apps into our Collabora Office product family. They are now a supported part of our business suite and come with every Collabora Office Enterprise subscription. Take a look: it’s a great app: feature rich, providing smooth editing, a polished user experience and lots of design goodness.
Rich editing for mobile devices – developed with your privacy in mind!
From opening … to viewing … to a rich editing experience
Collabora Office for Android (minimal version 5.0) and iOS is fully open source and brings you slick and useful editing features, like rich copy and paste, that the competition fails to deliver.
The app does not depend on external storage or services, so can be used offline. There is no longer a reason to hand over your data to somebody else to get rich mobile editing. Thus you can regain control over your documents and edit them without compromising your privacy!
One-handed touch tools for all sorts of editing
Collabora Office allows tables to be changed easily and in many ways. Handles in the document, as well as an attractive palette of tools, helps you perfect your table layout.
In our new mobile app, you will find the features where you expect them to be, giving you access to powerful functionality.
Slides and sheets at your fingertips
Choose layout and animations for presentations. A unique feature allows slide masters to be edited as well as applied.
Collabora Office for iOS and Android comes with a refined touch of usability. Sort the slides in your presentations using the convenient slide sorter. Scroll through the different sheets of your spreadsheet with the touch of a fingertip. Mobile document editing has never been easier and more fun.
Experience the polished user interface & design
Full control over layout of presentations
Rotate images with your fingertips
Highlight text with the tool at the palette
Copy & paste rich text objects on mobile
Our mobile solution stands out from all its competitors because of the smooth way in which it facilitates editing on mobile devices. Collabora Office allows you to actually copy and paste rich document content on your iOS or Android device. Try it out!
Attractive icons and an attractive layout
Sheet editing options in context menu
Editing your text file
Editing the content of a presentation
Native platform document storage
Collabora Office gives you back control over your documents. This includes the freedom to decide where to store the documents you edit from your mobile device. Our app allows you to easily integrate with privacy respecting, open source storage services such as Nextcloud, ownCloud or Seafile as well as proprietary file services such as OneDrive, Dropbox etc. Naturally you can also store and edit documents locally on your device without an external storage space. We think it’s good to notice that all the features in Collabora Office are available for all users, independent if it’s for private or for business use.
Yet more polish
Smooth inertial scrolling has been added for this release, with significant work on performance and stability. We’ve added the ability to export to various different file formats, to provide a great collaboration and interoperability experience with the users of other apps. Many usability wins too numerous to mention have been implemented. We have bundled spell-checking for English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and German for now – while we investigate shrinking the installation size to fit more. (Note selecting spell checking language currently is only on tablets.)
Two apps – one philosophy
Creating new document in iOS
Opening documents in the Android app
Last year, we paved the road so that the development of our mobile apps would be more consistent. In particular, the completely new development of the iOS app blazed the train. Both apps now share a substantially common codebase with our flagship product Collabora Online.
After our successful implementation on iOS, we re-used the same approach for our Android app. This replaced the existing LibreOffice Viewer code which had seen only very little activity for a long time, creating a fully functional and productive mobile office solution.
Welcome to the Collabora Office family
With today’s release, the apps for Android and iOS have officially become a part of our Collabora Office for Enterprise product. The family is now complete. These mobile apps complement Collabora Online and our existing desktop versions for Linux, MacOS and Windows. What does this mean for you? We can provide SLAs for our customers, as well as a close product management relationship to help steer our future development. Each improvement or issue addressed for one solution (online, mobile, desktop) can enhance all the others. Last but not least, it means the consistent and sustainable development of the mobile software.
For use on F-Droid, please read the information on this page.
Thanks to everyone who contributed!
Collabora invested huge effort and resources to bring into being a fully functional open source office suite for mobile devices. This success is built on the support of many individuals, the great LibreOffice community. Fundamentally this could not have been achieved without the support of SUSE, CloudOn, Smoose, Adfinis SyGroup and The Document Foundations’ generous historic donors. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work. Please check our previous articles about the beta releases of the Android and iOS app, where we credit several of the people involved and where you can read more about their valuable contributions. All of our code is contributed to LibreOffice, and can be expected in LibreOffice 7, although we have our own theme. Would you like to be part of the story ? get involved today.
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.
Every Winter the Anadolu University in Eskişehir, Turkey, hosts a large Free Software Winter Camp. This year it took place from Jan 25 – Jan 28, 2020, covering over 50 different classes with more than 40 different topics, and close to 1500 participants tutored by over 100 instructors. One of those classes was the LibreOffice Development Workshop, sponsored by Collabora Productivity.
For the four days of intensive training 20 students from all over the country were accepted. While the workshop itself was free, the participants were expected to cover the costs for travel and accommodation. This year 16 students showed for LibreOffice Development Workshop given by Collabora’s Muhammet Kara – a number which was a significant increase compared to the number from the previous year!
The participants of the LibreOffice Development Workshop at Free Software Winter Camp 2020.
In order to be accepted, the students had to have knowledge in C++, the principals of object-oriented programming, and at least user-level experience on a GNU/Linux system. During the workshop the 16 participants got familiar with the processes and tools of LibreOffice development and bug fixing.
Within the four days workshop the students contributed 64 commits, documented in the LibreOffice wiki. Two memorable examples of contributions were an important improvement by Onur Yilmaz for the Automatic Redaction feature and a Python script to analyse the LibreOffice code-base for styling issues written by Batuhan Taşkaya.
Muhammet Kara reported, that the feedback from the participants was very positive:
“Almost all pointed out that they have improved their development skills, and they would like to continue contributing.”
We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation once again to the effort of Muhammet, the Linux Users Association of Turkey and Anadolu University for providing this exceptional training opportunity. We look forward seeing more contributions from that dedicated group of participants.
Are you searching for a interesting open source project to join? Remember, you’re really welcome to participate in CODE – the Collabora Online Development Edition.
FOSDEM is a success story! The growth that this major European developer conference has seen in the 20 years of its existence reflects the importance of open source technology. It is one of the most important venues for exchanging information about the latest developments and meeting like-minded engineers in person. It is an event that we never miss. FOSDEM celebrated the 20th anniversary. LibreOffice – turning ten this year – is looking forward to a milestone birthday, too.
Michael Meeks at the LibreOffice Hackfest
Directly after the conference, the two-day LibreOffice Hackfest organized by The Document Foundation took place in Brussels that we of course joined. This FOSDEM was also record-breaking in our personal view. The team of Collabora Productivity held several interesting talks about document processing with a clear focus on online.
You find the video recordings of our talks and the complete slides for download here in this article!
LibreOffice turns ten and what’s next
In the history track in the main room Collabora’s Michael Meeks held a much appreciated talk about ten years of LibreOffice, demonstrating what is going on in LibreOffice today, and where is it going.
The second of three talks at FOSDEM 2020 by Michael was part of the devroom “Collaborative Information and Content Management Applications” and showed how (relatively) easy it is to integrate Collabora Online into different solutions.
Bringing Collabora Online to your web app
Collabora Online can bring the power of rich, secure, collaborative document editing inside your web app. This presentation shows how this works.
Most of the Collabora Productivity talks took place on Saturday in the Open Document Editors devroom. The speakers gave five presentations on different aspects of open document formats, customization and the optimization of Collabora Online on mobile systems.
Online Open Document Editing New Possibilities and Interoperability
Open Document editing is, as many things in life, more and more an online action. Collabora introduced the important first steps in 2015. Since then much work has been done and LibreOffice and Collabora Online grew enormously in possibilities. This presentation by Cor Nouws shows the new and improved features from last year, while the Q&A gives you an outlook to the future.
Collabora Online is quite flexible in the means that you can alter the visual appearance to your personal taste and needs without the need to change other core components. UX designer Pedro Pinto Silva explains how to customize Collabora Online!
Overcoming the synchronous web copy/paste API’s limitations in real browsers is extremely non-trivial. Michael’s talk is all about defeating the vast API and implementation disasters in copy/paste. Find out how we provide rich copy/paste support across documents and inside our app! Collabora Online clearly wins compared to other online applications.
Collabora developers helped to develop many Collabora Online integrations. In this talk by Andras Timar explains the integration with web applications!
We have chosen a new approach for the Collabora Office Android app. In this talk, Jan Holesowsky describes how we tweaked LibreOffice & the Online to get an Android app. Still in beta, but easier to extend, maintain and richer in features.
Christmas and the end of the year are a time to reflect on the events of the past months. We have come a long way together and would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers, partners and community for your great support! 2019 has been a big year with important new releases for mobile devices. We brought Collabora Office to iOS and released a complete rewrite of our Android app. Collabora Office, Collabora Online and CODE have seen significant growth in features and improvements in usability.
Our products now bring effective collaboration with maximum control for organizations. A truly Open Source product that gives users ontrol over their own data and privacy, with excellent Microsoft interoperability, on every platform. The team at Collabora keeps growing, and more people than ever before are benefiting from our products and code contributions. Of course, this all would not have been possible without our talented staff, our great partners and the engaged community of volunteers around LibreOffice.
You all have made 2019 a fantastic year. Here is a short summary of what we achieved together!
Collabora Online improvements
Collabora Online 4.0.0
In January, we celebrated the major release Collabora Online 4.0.0 including a completely fresh look. It featured a better, simplified and more appealing UI. It also marked the point where we started to bring more of the full functionality for important features available online such as custom headers and footers or rich table of contents management for text documents.
Collabora Online 4.0 also featured integration with Vereign. We partnered with the Swiss open source company to provide authentic documents bearing the qualified electronic signature of your hardened self-sovereign identity.
Collabora Online 4.0.2 & 4.0.3
March brought two versions with notable fixes and updates. For example, when collaborating on a single document it really helps users to see the names being displayed over the caret of the people that are actively typing and moving through the document.
Collabora Online 4.0.4
This release in May added the feature to rename a file while editing.
This version introduces new admin features and made integration easier via the reuse cookie option for WOPI implementations.
Collabora Online 4.0.7
In September, we added the opacity setting to configure tile Watermarks, as well as our regular set of interoperability improvements.
Collabora Online 4.0.8
In October version 4.0.8 provided different watermarks for each user for use with ownCloud’s ‘secure collaboration’ and Nextcloud’s ‘secure view‘.
Collabora Online can give each user it’s own watermark
Collabora Online 4.0.9
To improve security, and make them harder to ignore we added 45 degrees rotated user-watermarks for collaboration in these secure environments, as well as several fixes such as highlighting search results in read-only documents.
CODE 4.2.0 sets the bar for the next year
In December, we released a major refresh and upgrade of CODE, the Collabora Online Development Edition. CODE is perfect for home users that want to start to run their own online office suite and for tech-enthusiast. This CODE version is the base for the upcoming Collabora Online 4.2.0 release, due in early 2020. It has a fresh new look, with updated theming, and a refreshed toolbar, and we dare to say that it represents another huge step forward in features for online office productivity and collaboration!
One of the major improvements is the powerful sidebar. Changing properties of many elements and objects in office documents is now much while working in the browser, with close to the same feature richness that is available in Collabora Office on the desktop.
The sidebar and new dialogs support numerous advanced features.
Besides choosing a colour from a palette, you can also make use of the colour picker. The handling of links has also been improved.
Click to see some of the sidebar magic happen in Calc!
All the powerful functions of Conditional Formatting in Calc can now be controlled via the dialog.
Collabora Office 6.0.2 & 6.0.3 add new features
Un-float Table button in Writer
Collabora Office, our enterprise-grade, long term supported open-source office suite, sees major updates, new features and interoperability improvements every year. In January, Collabora Office 6.0.2 introduced the Unfloat Table button, making it easy to work with imported floating tables from Microsoft Word documents.
Another big ask from our customers was for redaction, so this year we created a built-in Redaction tool, and went on to extend that with fast and automatic marking of text.
Another really useful feature, particularly for web integration of spreadsheets is the Page per sheet PDF export we implemented for Calc, allowing users to see apparently non-paginated spreadsheet previews.
Collabora Office 6.2: The best in features, interoperability and support in open source
And right before the end of the year, we made another huge step. Not only concerning the release points, but also in features and interoperability. Version 6.2 came just in time for Christmas.
This includes many features from ourselves and the community, such as the enhanced printing dialog, and improved Help which make working with Collabora Office even more efficient and user-friendly.
Collabora Office on Apple iOS
In 2019 we delivered our first version for Apple’s tablets. In a huge joint effort together with Adfinis SyGroup, started in 2018, we brought Collabora Office to iOS (beta). It is now available through Apple’s app store for free.
Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.
Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS
Composing texts in Collabora Office iOS.
Making the app easier to use: The sidebar contains contextual features and makes good use of the wide screen of the iPad.
Working with tables in text documents.
Including pictures in Writer documents
Selection of cells in a spreadsheet
Collabora Office on Android
Shortly after the release of Collabora Office on iOS, we released a complete re-write of Collabora Office on Android. This is now based on the same technology as Collabora Online. More than just a viewer it allows the editing of documents with a new phone-friendly UI. The beta version is available from the Google Play Store.
Text file with spreadsheet embedded – Collabora Office for Android
Image handling in text document – Collabora Office for Android
Community & LibreOffice
We love to work alongside with, and contribute to the LibreOffice community. We were pleased to sponsor the LibreOffice Conference 2019 that took place in Almería, Spain.
One day before the conference we organized a special team building day for our staff, partners and customers and went snorkelling in Cabo de Gata. Big fun!
Conference Slides
2019 has also been a year full of traveling, conferences, … and of course slides. Here are just a few examples of talks held by Michael Meeks, Andras Timar and Jan Holešovský held this year. They and many others are available for download.
LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara
As part of our community building investment we sponsored a LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara. Here, Collabora Productivity Developer Muhammet Kara is teaching enthusiastic students of the Hacettepe University about C++ and developing LibreOffice. Pranam Lashkari has also been training students in India:
Summary
In summary, it has been a busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We can only present a small part of what we got up to with a few pictures and links in this overview. We have advanced our mission to make Open Source rock; giving users privacy and businesses control over their data, with our open products. Not only has our work produced excellent results, but we have also had a lot of fun. If you’d like to get involved its easy to partner with us, buy from us, or to get involved in the awesome LibreOffice community. We are full of energy and have lots of new ideas and plans in the pipeline for 2020. We would like to thank the whole team, particularly our great partners, and customers who make our work possible, and the community who make it fun, and we look forward to continuing the successful work with you in 2020!
