FOSDEM 2023 is back home in Brussels. Meet the Collabora Productivity team at Europe’s largest gathering of open-source developers and have a chat, some fries or a beer with us (also: make sure to grab some stickers!). As usual, our engineers will be giving talks about the latest developments in Collabora Online, Collabora Office and LibreOffice at the LibreOffice Technology devroom. Here’s the schedule!
Saturday, February 4th 2023
Collabora at the LibreOffice Technology devroom
Noel Grandin
16:10 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Turbocharging an Elephant – Making LibreOffice Faster
Most of the easy tasks are already done. This talk covers several improvements to LibreOffice, that required lots of preparational work and interesting challenges to introduce improvements into a massive (and messy) codebase.
Pranam Lashkari
16:20 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Feature Locking and Feature Restriction – Integrator’s Way to Unlock Potential
In the talk, Pranam Lashkari will explain and demonstrate how feature locking and restrictions work in Collabora Online. Using such methods, integrators can control which features to deliver to which user or group.
Sarper Akdemir
16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
An Interoperability Improvement in LibreOffice Impress Tables
Sarper Akdemir tells the story of an interoperability bug fixing adventure where the problem turned out to be deeper than it appeared at first glance, showcasing how there are multiple approaches to a single interoperability problem.
Miklos Vajna
16:40 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Writer Content Controls – What Happened in the Past Half Year
LibreOffice was capable of handling form filling in Writer for a while already. In the meantime, the competition introduced Structured Document Tags. Writer Content Controls are meant to perform a great handling of this third type of form filling. See Miklos Vajna‘s talk about what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice, hear what still needs doing and find out how you can help.
17:40 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
LibreOfficeKit – Bridge Between Your Application and LibreOffice
Szymon Klos gives a short introduction into integrating LibreOffice using LibreOfficeKit with external software. He will describe the most important code pieces and show, where to look for information. Furthermore, he’ll demonstrate how to add new features, which API we provide, and what can be done with tiled rendering.
Michael Meeks
17:50 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Collabora Online Over Lockdown – How LibreOffice Technology in the Browser Got Better
Come and hear how Collabora Online (COOL) has improved over the COVID-19 era, not only in core feature-function, but also in ease of access and deployment for everyone. See how we can deliver scalable, secure, on-premise editing of your documents with a simple, easy to deploy office for the free world.
Make Collabora Online Yours – Customize and Integrate it Everywhere
Collabora Online is quite flexible in the means that you can alter to your personal taste without the need to change other core components. Pedro Pinto Silva shows how to make Collabora Online yours. Discover all the shining new additions to the user interface and learn how to customize and integrate it everywhere.
Tor Lillqvist
18:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Collabora Online and WASM – Assembling Off-line Collabora Online with the Web
Come hear Tor Lillqvist‘s talk about a new approach to enabling browser deployment of rich office functionality – built on top of allotropia’s investment in enabling the core LibreOffice technology to compile to Web Assembly (WASM) – combined with the Collabora Online front-end. Hear about how this can be used to provide a fall-back (non-collaborative) editing mode for when you lose network connectivity for a while, and about the plans to re-synchronize documents on the return from such a tunnel.
Collabora Online 22.05 is our latest enterprise release. It’s suitable for large-scale deployment, and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates as well as interaction with product management, helping to direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organizations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control over them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host it on your own hardware or to integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner. For any questions or tailored solutions, do not hesitate to contact hello@collaboraoffice.com.
The Univention Summit has returned to its traditional date. Before the pandemic, the event in Bremen was an annual kick-off for showing how valuable open source is for digital sovereignty in companies, educational institutions and public administration. We are pleased to have been able to contribute to the success of the conference as Gold Sponsors yet again this year.
Open-source solutions as part of a digital-sovereign perspective for societies
As in previous years, the Univention Summit managed to bring together crucial players for advancing Digital Sovereignty at this year’s congress. Many of the crises that illustrated the need for more sovereign solutions for Europe in recent years, such as European dependencies on global trade chains – eg in the area of semiconductor shortages, or resource dependency on Russia – made clear by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, remained topics of the Summit. There were also references to current examples, such as the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. The summit succeeded in positioning open-source technology and the innovative power of medium-sized companies as a way out of one-sided digital dependencies. Imagery of the summit can be found in in Univention’s blog, the recordings of the keynotes of the congress are available on their YouTube channel.
“Sustainable Digitalization rocks!”, keynote by Peter Ganten (Univention)
In focus: The digital-sovereign workplace
One of the central topics that determined this year’s summit was the dPhoenix Suite. The digital-sovereign workplace, provided for many thousands of employees in public administration, makes it possible to work simply, web-based & digitally sovereign. The dPhoenix Suite combines various open-source modules from different manufacturers and is hosted on German data centres. The modules, from file sharing, email, video conferencing and office application are developed in Germany and Europe. Collabora Online is the online office application software within the dPhoenix Suite.
The Univention Summit 2023 in took place at the Metropol Theater in Bremen
The Collabora stand at the Univention Summit 2023
Workshop: Collaboration and document security with Collabora Online
The second day of the Univention Summit was dedicated to workshops. Many visitors made use of the opportunity to deepen the impressions gained in the talks and at the stands. On the second day of the congress, we from Collabora held a very well-attended workshop on “Collaboration and Document Security with Collabora Online” in the Haus der Wissenschaft. Here, people who have not yet had the opportunity to work with Collabora Online had the chance to learn about the advantages of our software, while other users took the opportunity to hear first-hand about recent and upcoming developments. The slides of the presentation (in German) are available for download here.
Click on the image to download the slides!
Thank you to all participants
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those involved. Many thanks to the Univention team for organising another great event. We were very happy to be part of a lively exchange with our numerous partners on site and to have many interesting conversations with visitors at our stand. We are excited to build a more transparent, more open and more reliable digital future together with you! See you again at the Univention Summit 2024!
Thank You for Everything We Achieved Together in 2022 🤝
At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team in cooperation with our worldwide network of partners and the community. Luckily, the year 2022 was less dominated by the global pandemic. Throughout the year, international travelling became easier and in-person events and conferences became much more common again. However, the world kept being shaken. The Russian assault on Ukraine emphasized once again the massive importance of digital sovereignty, as Michael Meeks pointed out in several of his talks, like his Digital Sovereignty talk at the SFScon22.
Collabora held the first in-person COOL Days 2022 in Berlin, which brought together partners, the team, and the community. Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen major performance improvements and increased functionality. We released the new major release of our flagship product Collabora Online 22.05, including performance boosts and impressing new features. Thank you for your support! Let’s take a look at what we have achieved together this year. 💜
Collabora Online 22.05: New Features and Better Performance 📈
With the release of version 22.05, Collabora Online reached new heights in performance, interoperability and usability. Many exciting features that had earlier been implemented and fine-tuned inside CODE 22.05, have been introduced this month.
Grammar check in a Writer Document in Collabora Online 22.05
Sparklines in Collabora Online 22.05
Translate using DeepL in Collabora Online
Consistent Language identification in Collabora Online 21.11
CODE 22.05 Cutting-Edge Features and Path to a Rock-Solid Enterprise Version 💪
The latest major release of the Collabora Online Development Edition CODE 22.05 was released in June. Versions of CODE always appear in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online. The Development Edition contains all new features which are extensively tested before being incorporated into the Enterprise version. An overview of CODE releases for the year 2022 can be found in the release notes. You can find the conversations about CODE on social media, by searching for the hashtag #cool_dev on Mastodon or Twitter.
More Groundbreaking Major Releases: Collabora Online 21.11✌️
The Year 2022 saw two major releases. In January, we released the enterprise version 21.11 of Collabora Online. It included a complete redesign of the sidebar, enhancing its responsiveness and had a strong focus on performance enhancements.
Collabora Online 21.11 Including a New Sidebar, RTL Support and Performance Boosts
January 2022, major release 21.11 introducing a quicker, “native” sidebar, right-to-left support, Calc-Excel compatible formulae and improved PPTX import
March 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.2 including Accessibility Checker, faster rotation of bitmap graphics, and an improved UX
April 2022,Collabora Online 21.11.3, dynamic configuration of multiple hosts and improvements for complex commenting cases
May 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.4, toggling between Compact View and Tabbed View now available through the user interface, several functions added to the UI’s
June 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.5, support of emphasis animations (spin, grow, shrink) in SVG presentation engine of Collabora Online Impress
August 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.6, many fixes added including the zoom factors in the glow and soft edge effects and the CSV import dialog
October 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.7, fixed selection of candidates for Japanese IME input, UI for adding print ranges in Calc, and override CheckFileInfo
October 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.8 several fixes like the SVG export of text fields, a memory leak related to the remote config feature, UI fixes
RTL support introduced in Collabora Online 21.11
Fast image rotation in Collabora Online 21.11.2
Consistent Language identification in Collabora Online 21.11
Powerful New Features for Collabora Office on the Desktop 🖥️
Collabora Office 22.05 Continues Enhancing Productivity and Interoperability
May 2022 saw the latest major release of Collabora Office, our long term supported desktop Office Suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release brought a number of powerful productivity features like spreadsheets with 16,000 columns, sparklines to Calc (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and saw linked paragraph and character styles arrive in Writer. The new features developed by Collabora are now also available in LibreOffice 7.4. Collabora Office for Windows is available through the Microsoft Store. The latest version for macOS can be bought from the App Store. Furthermore, we are encouraging you to help us test the latest features inside our unstable snapshots.
Moreover, the Collabora Office 6.4 branch saw numerous updates, mostly including fixes and performance and interoperability improvements. You can find these changes documented inside the release notes.
Many new Features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱
Collabora Office Brings Powerful Office Productivity to Your Pocket
This year saw a major update of Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS including numerous advanced productivity features, excellent document compatibility and a much improved user experience. The first major release to version 21.11 included performance improvements, a faster & responsive toolbar on tablets, enhanced contextual Toolbars, better shadow effects and much more.
April 2022, Collabora Office 21.11.3 for Android, iOS & Chrome OS – major release including Contextual toolbars, improved PPTX import, blurry shadows, soft edges for objects
August 2022, Collabora Office 21.11.6 for Android, iOS & Chrome OS – improved user experience and fixes
Improved Import of PPTX with Shaped Images
Contextual Toolbars enhancing the user experience
Improved Shadow Effects
Glow & Soft Edge effects
Amazing News, Interesting Figures 📈
280 Partners Worldwide
In 2022, our large network of amazing partners kept growing. We can now rely on over 280 partners from more than 50 countries. We help each other to promote open source, privacy & digital sovereign solutions and re-invest the proceeds into creating great new software. Find a Collabora partner in a special field or area, or become a partner yourself!
Collabora’s Contributions to LibreOffice 7.3 and 7.4
Collabora is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice technology. Our developers are responsible for many commits to the LibreOffice core. Thanks to the sponsorship of our clients, we were able to introduce many new features and improvements to LibreOffice 7.3 and LibreOffice 7.4. The LibreOffice 7.3 release saw many performance focused enhancements (increased PDF export speed of some complex documents, faster loading of large RTL documents and insertion of large charts, rendering improvements in the Skia-based rendering backend and introduction of a Skia-based rendering backend on macOS). We also introduced numerous new features and interoperability improvements to LibreOffice 7.4. This version saw the arrival of native rich text and checkbox content controls support from Word, remote LanguageTool grammar checking, support for sparklines (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and the use of 16384 columns in Calc and support for WebP images. Find more technical background on some of our contributions inside this blog. More great stuff is going to arrive in LibreOffice 7.5. We appreciate any help in testing. You’ll find the latest features in a Collabora Office snapshot or a pre-released Dev-Version of LibreOffice.
Linked paragraph and character styles in WriterExample with 3 types of sparklines
Collabora Online Community Contributions #cool_dev 📈
The Collabora Online Community kept growing and helped to improve the software through their commits, feedback, and translations. You can see from the stats above that our Community is doing great things! You, too, can help to make Collabora Online better. Join the discussions in our forum, translate strings on Weblate, file bug reports or feature requests on GitHub and spread the word on Collabora Online!
The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️
The Collabora Online SDK describes the main methods that allow you to interact with different Collabora Online components. Find installation guides, frequently asked questions, Post Message API and documentation on exiting integrations and on how to create new ones. Of course, we added new documentations to the SDK this year for new features like the DeepL Translator (sponsored by Adfinis) or the LanguageTool Grammar Checker.
Starting at a Distance, Coming together in Person Again 🤝
The beginning of the year 2022 was still heavily impacted by the global pandemic. Major events like FOSDEM 2022 or the FOSSASIA Summit 2022 took place as remote events. Others had been rescheduled to a later date, like the Univention Summit. Luckily, throughout the year, travelling became easier again, and many conferences, such as the LibreOffice Conference in Milan, and the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin, could take place in person again. In October, we held our own COOL Days in Berlin – for the first time as an in-person meeting with the Collabora team, community and our partners.
COOL Days 2022 in Berlin
This year, for the first time ever, we were able to host the COOL Days as an in-person event. The three-day event focused exclusively on topics related to Collabora Online – and on some fun and team building experiences. Read the wrap-up of our activities from the community day, the partner day and the tech day on our blog. All the recordings of the talk from the Tech Day can be found on our playlist on YouTube, many slides can be found inside our repository on GitHub. The next COOL Days are coming very soon… Join us in Cambridge in March 2023!
COOL Days 2022 Impressions
Ready for take-off? We went skydiving.
Joining staff and partners at the COOL Days
Developer talks at the Tech Day
COOL Days 2022 Videos
Using DeepL in Collabora Online by Jan Holesovsky
Dynamic Font Download by Tor Lillqvist
PDF Export Advanced Options by Miklos Vajna
FOSDEM 2022 – A Massive Remote Experience
Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like 2022 – FOSDEM is one of the major gatherings for Open-Source developers. The Collabora team held several talks on Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Find the all videos of our talks in our FOSDEM 2022 playlist and all the slides in our blog.
Keep up to date with our public newsletter. If you would like to receive regular updates like this one on the news on Collabora Online, Collabora Office and future COOL Days events, please sign up to our newsletter.
Summary
It has been a very busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We have enjoyed seeing the Collabora Online Community grow and keep on advancing our mission to make open-source rock. We continued giving users privacy and businesses control over their data. We managed to achieve excellent results, and had a good time working on them – despite some challenging conditions that persisted in 2022. The Berlin edition of COOL Days was one of the highlights for us this year. We have big plans for 2023, some of them unfolding already in early spring! Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to download Collabora Online. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
If you are one of those who often work with documents in multiple languages, this is something that might be interesting for you. Thanks to Adfinis, Collabora Online now offers the possibility to translate parts of your document with a just few clicks. DeepL is a leading AI company based in Germany. It offers the DeepL translator based on machine learning that provides translations to many languages in an exceptional quality. Additional languages are constantly being added to the service. It is now possible to make use of these high-quality translations directly in Collabora Online.
Selecting text for a DeepL translation in Collabora Online
Technical Set-up
The DeepL translation is supported since Collabora Online 22.05.7.3 released in November 2022. Before you can make use of the feature in Collabora Online, you have to enable some configurations. DeepL offers an API that provides programmatic access to DeepL’s machine translation technology. To make use of it, you will need an API-Key. The DeepL-API settings need to be enabled inside coolwsd.xml. You can find the technical details inside the Collabora Online SDK. Note that content of the document you translate, will be sent to the cloud API. If you are interested in some more technical background on this feature, you can watch Jan Holesovsky‘s talk on this from the COOL Days 2022 event.
How to Translate Text in Collabora Online
Once the feature is correctly set up, it’s straight-forward to use the translation feature. In a Writer document, select the text you would like to have translated. Inside the Review tab (NotebookBar, Tabbed view) you will find a Translate button. If you are using the Compact View of the Collabora Online UI, you’ll find the Translate feature inside the Tools menu. When clicking on it, a dialog will appear, allowing you to select the target language. Select the target language from the drop-down menu. The translated text is now available inside your document. Generally, the translation will preserve the basic formatting of the original content, however, depending on the length of the translation or the complexity of the formatting, you might need to do some smaller readjustments of the paragraph.
3 Steps to Translating with DeepL in Collabora Online
Select the text you would like to translate
Click on the Translate button inside the Review tab (or in Tools)
Select the target language from the dialog
1. Select the text
2. Click the Translate button
3. Select the target language
Target Languages Available For Translations
The DeepL team is constantly adding new languages to their service. Currently, as of December 2022, the translation feature supports translations to the following 28 languages:
Please be aware, the quality of the translation might differ between different target languages, depending on the machine learning progress of each language in DeepL. New languages will become available as soon as they are supported in DeepL.
Try it in Collabora Online or CODE
The DeepL feature has been introduced to Collabora Online in the release of Collabora Online 22.05.7.3. You can test the feature in our free demo. Tech enthusiasts may also like to test it inside an installation of CODE, the free Collabora Online Development Edition, intended for home users and Developers who would like to help to test the latest features first. Find all the instructions here.
This feature was made possible by the funding of our Swiss Partner Adfinis. Thank you, for helping us to create this feature. See our Consultancy page for more examples of projects we have worked on for our Partners and clients. Maybe you would like to partner with us? Find out more about how to become a Collabora Partner!
The Talks and Slides by Collaboran’s at the LibreOffice Conference 2022
The LibreOffice Conference 2022 (LibOCon) took place from September 28 to October 1 in Milan. It was the first LibreOffice Conference since the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic that took place as an in-person event. Collabora was one of the sponsors, and a significant number of our developers contributed talks on various aspects of LibreOffice technology. Did you miss any of those? Don’t worry! All our talks are available for you on YouTube inside our LibOCon playlist. Please also feel free to download the slides we included in this blog post.
Keynotes and Advocating
Michael Meeks: Sponsor Keynote Collabora
Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity, takes a look at the latest developments in LibreOffice from an organisational and ecosystem perspective. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides
Michael Meeks: The ongoing story of Online
Hear Michael Meeks tell the history of LibreOffice in the browser. From it’s pre-historic past as StarPortal, through gtk-broadway prototypes, to Collabora Online as we know it today. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides
Technical Talks
Sarper Akdemir: Chasing an Interoperability Bug in Impress
During the Quality Assurance track, Sarper Akdemir explained how to fix an interoperability bug by showcasing the whole process of understanding, fixing, and implementing tests. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides
Tomaž Vajngerl: Sparklines and Chart Data Tables – New Features in Calc
Sparklines are mini charts, that are drawn into a cell. In his talk, senior software engineer Tomaž Vajngerl presented the features and the challenges during the development. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides
Miklos Vajna : Content Controls in Writer
While LibreOffice and Collabora Office were already capable of filling forms via form controls or form fields, they can now also fully represent content controls. In this talk by Senior Software Engineer Miklos Vajna, see how this work was implemented! See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides
Follow Collabora
Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online, a powerful online office suite, which you can integrate into your own infrastructure. It prioritises your digital sovereignty and provides you with all the tools to keep your data secure, without compromising on features. 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 technology 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, Android, and Chrome OS. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
16:10 – LibreOffice Technology devroom 
See details 
