Category: Community En

Understanding the differences between LibreOffice Online, CODE and Collabora Online

Richard Brock 6 Comments

Collabora, happy to be a major contributor to LibreOffice technology, is also driving development in the world of free software for online productivity solutions.

What is the situation in 2021, how can you choose what best meets your needs? Read more about CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), Collabora Online, and LibreOffice online!

 

 

CODE – Collabora Online Development Edition

  • CODE is the online version that is under constant development, so not in a stable state
    • It is perfect for home use/small teams
    • It is however not suitable for production environments
    • Builds are released on average once a month and announced on our news pages
  • CODE is built around the Collabora Office core
  • Documentation on getting CODE set up, is available at the CODE-page
  • It is available as a docker image
  • Getting involved with development is easy – and appreciated: goto collaboraonline at github.

Collabora Online

  • The production-ready and stable edition of Collabora Online
    • with Long Term Support, an SLA, and signed security updates
    • with access to our Customer and Partner portal; advanced technical documentation and support
    • Collabora also provides tailored solutions
  • Built around the Collabora Office core
  • Partners and customers receive frequent updates
  • Online trials in ownCloud, Nextcloud, and Seafile
  • Enterprises can get Collabora Online in their favorite file share and sync software via one of our partners
  • Cloud and Hosting providers can offer Collabora Online to their customers by becoming a partner
  • Getting involved with development is easy on collaboraonline at github.

libreoffice_tdfLibreOffice online

  • LibreOffice online development was set up at the LibreOffice project by Collabora in 2014
  • As a source code project, LibreOffice in the cloud aimed at growing wider contributions
  • This InfoGraph shows Collabora’s contributions to the development.
  • To ensure future investment Collabora moved the development to GitHub in 2020
    • More on this and other reasons in the FAQ
  • Update TDF’s board voted for (delayed) Atticization (policy). After the agreed deadline the ESC decided that the first criteria to keep it out of the Attic was not met.
  • The source will still be mirrored at LibreOffice cgit, and Collabora continues to contribute substantially to the underlying LibreOffice technology alongside the community.

Pricing, Education & NGO’s, Success stories

Download our Whitepapers for further information

White Paper

“Usage differences of CODE and Collabora Online”

White Paper

“What are the differences between Collabora Online and
Collabora Office?”

Background information

Collabora, a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community, is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud. Initial development started back in 2011 and four years later, in 2015, CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) was created, allowing people to check out LibreOffice in the cloud for the very first time. Shortly after this, the first production-ready Collabora Online was released.

We encourage people to contribute. While Collabora has done more than 95% of code commits so far, we are glad that since the move of collaboraonline to github more people are getting involved. Maybe you can join too?

Collabora developers mentor successful GSoC Projects

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Autumn is just around the corner. For many participants in the GSoC 2020, a busy and instructive summer full of hacking on open source projects came to an end a few weeks ago. Commits have been contributed and final reports have been written. This year experienced Collabora Productivity developers were again mentors for various projects of the Google Summer of Code for the LibreOffice project. Here are some examples of projects our team helped to succeed!

Analysing Writer documents with the “Style Inspector”

The “Style Inspector” is a great new tool. You can access it through a new icon (an eye combined with a pencil) in the Sidebar (also via “Sidebar Settings”). The Style Inspector displays in full detail (and hierarchical) all styles and also direct formatting applied to a cursor position in a Writer document. So you can analyse, identify problems and clean them up. Sometimes formatting in documents is messy and people mix styles with direct formatting. The Style Inspector allows you to see that.
The feature is available for testing in pre-released development versions of LibreOffice. Shivan Kumar Singh picked up the proposal from the LibreOffice Design Team. He was mentored by Collaborans TomažVajngerl and MikeKaganski with Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice Design Team. Take a look into Singh’s final report! It is an inspiring a guide on how to approach a big project like LibreOffice.

Improving the way to find and add extensions

There are many useful extensions to LibreOffice and users should be able to find them easily! Like in app stores like Gnome Software or the Play Store. That is basic idea behind “Tight Integrations” and the proposal from the LibreOffice design team. Yusuf Keten made this his GSOC project a success and added the possibility to search and sort the through extensions without having to leave LibreOffice. You start this new way to search with a clear yellow star with a download arrow, that is in the templates dialog, at the icons in the view options, or from the galleries pane in the side bar.
If you are curios about this handy extensions feature you can already test and find it in the latest LibreOffice pre-releases. Yusuf was mentored ba Collabora’s Muhammet Kara and Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice design team. Find all the details of Yusuf’s work in his final report.

“I learned a lot of things during the GSoC. Although GSoC is finished, I will continue to contribute to LibreOffice. I am very happy to be part of the LibreOffice community.” (Yusuf Keten)

Access the Tight Integrations manager through the icon in Gallery
Browse, search and sort through Templates, Galleries & Icons in the new extension dialog.

Changing the contour – shadows are becoming blurry

New blurry shadow option

Did you know, that in LibreOffice the shadows are just a copy of the object? There are already a lot of settings to change their appearance, like its colour, its angle, the transparency and distance behind the object. Mentored by Collaboran’s TomažVajngerl and Miklos Vajna, Ahmad Ganzouri added another option. The “Blurry Shadows” make use of the already implemented BitmapFilterStackBlur and make the shape of the shadow look very realistic. Find the details around the development in Ahmad’s final report. We have seen the Blurry Shadow option in the master branch and expect it to be available to all users in Version 7.1 of LibreOffice. The option can be easily accessed via the “Area” dialog in “Objects & Shapes” or directly via the corresponding Sidebar module.

The blur setting can be defined Area dialog.

Searching for a mentor? Join us GitHub!

Google Summers of Code are an excellent opportunity to learn working in many open source projects. But where to find mentors during the rest of the year? We recently moved the code of Collabora Online to GitHub. You will find a growing community there, with easy hacks to get started. Community Mentor Muhammet Kara and the rest of our team of open source developers are there and willing to share their vast experience.

Updated LibreOffice growth infographic (2020)

Cor Nouws 1 Comment

Right after celebrating a great LibreOffice 10th Anniversary, we are delighted to present the 2020-version 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.

Many numbers are again up. Our devs are top code contributors to LibreOffice with 7518 code commits. And the popular “Collabora Online Development Edition” (CODE), for home use & small teams (find details here), has over 50 million Docker image pulls! We are extremely grateful for all partners and customers working with us to make this possible.

Would you like to see the previous versions; these are here: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, & 2014.

Soon there will be the  LibreOffice Conference 2020 (October 14 to October 16), where you can meet developers, including of course our developers, and other contributors from the community, and attend the online sessions of the talks of our developers.

So.. check out the updated LibreOffice growth infoGraphic on 2020 here:

 

Try out Collabora Office and Collabora Online!

Collabora’s LibreOffice development experts are supporting students for GSoC 2020

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Collabora developers are mentoring students during this year’s Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is an amazing, international program encouraging the participation of university students in open source software development. It enables students to independently gain practical experience on concrete projects and matches them with experienced developers. This year a record number of almost 1200 students is taking part in the sponsored projects. Collabora is always delighted to support GSoC projects: some of our experienced developers are mentoring the students: guiding them in the code, encouraging them, and supporting the growth of their skills.

Collabora developers at GSoC 2020

Also for this year’s GSoC several students are being mentored by Collabora Productivity team members. Tomaž Vajngerl, Muhammet Kara, Miklos Vajna, Mike Kaganski, and Michael Meeks are assisting the work on several projects around LibreOffice. And our companies involvement is not just limited to that. Andrej Shadura, a developer from our parent company Collabora, is in charge of various projects around the Debian operating system. Collabora’s support of these Google Summer of Code reflects our commitment to open source software and is also a matter of personal attachment. Several of today’s Collaborans like Elie Tournier and Rohan Garg have successfully participated in the GSoC program in the past. So have the current mentors Muhammet Kara, Miklos Vajna, and Pranam Lashkari from Collabora Productivity team.

A success story – development camps in Turkey

The successful application of no less than six LibreOffice office projects for this year’s Summer of Code would not be fully told without mentioning some previous happenings in winter. Collabora Productivity had sponsored the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara and the LibreOffice Development Workshop at the Anadolu University in Eskişehir (Turkey) during the Free Software Wintercamp 2020. These ambitious development courses by Muhammet Kara spawned no less than three of the six successfully submitted LibreOffice projects of GSoC 2020. Find out more about the great outcome of these development camps within our community news blog post.

LibreOffice projects mentored by Collabora Productivity

The student Ahmad Ganzouri has successfully submitted two projects. Supported by the mentors Tomaž Vajngerl, Miklos Vajna, and Michael Meeks, he will work on a project adding blurry shadows to objects in LibreOffice and on a second one that aims to move the current gallery data in favour to easier to handle ZIP files. Yusuf Keten, another participant of the LibreOffice Developers Bootcamp in Ankara, will be working on additions to better integrate extensions. Keten’s project is being mentored by Collabora’s Muhammet Kara.

Also Collabora’s parent company developers are mentoring

Another interesting GSoC project is bringing a CiviCRM integration to LibreOffice and Collabora Office. “Styles Inspector“, also mentored by Tomaž Vajngerl, is another project aimed at LibreOffice. We all look forward to the results of the students work. And for sure we will try to cover some of that here. Another wonderful story is that of Collabora Productivity developer Pranam Lashkari. He was a GSoC student during the last two years while graduating and this year he is already a mentor for two projects within the Boost C++ libraries. Collabora developer Andrej Shadura is mentoring no less than three projects focusing on Android SDK Tools for the Debian operating system. Find out more about these and other noteworthy projects in the Collabora news blog.

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a program awarding a three months stipend to students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. The annual program started in 2005. This year, 199 organizations and 1199 student projects are taking part. Within the last 15 years more than 15.000 students from over 100 countries had been accepted. Developers from free and open source projects serve as mentors. Between 80 – 90% of the accepted projects get completed successfully.

Online development CI accessible via the internet

Cor Nouws Leave a comment

It’s now easier to check the status of your /libreoffice/online patches

Recently the CI (continuous integration) infrastructure for Online has been made accessible via the internet. Now developers from outside Collabora can directly check the status of their patches and builds.

 

Already for a while there was a Jenkins instance that checks patches on gerrit for the online-project (and our other projects), before they are submitted to cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/online/
This service is now running on dedicated hardware, what allows us to make it accessible directly from the internet. Links pointing to this server in TDF gerrit will work from now on.

 

How to participate in the project

This growing  access to our development makes it easier to join the project. Which we of course encourage 🙂  Therefore… read more about participating in developing LibreOffice online here!

If you have any questions, please leave a message here.