Recapping COOL Days 2023: The Event that Rocked Cambridge!

Thank you to all who attended our COOL Days 2023 meet up in Cambridge on 28th & 29th March. We had a great time organising the event for our partners, the Collabora team and open source community. It was a great success!

If you didn’t manage to make it to Cambridge, check out our 90 second YouTube short which shows a quick overview of the fun we had.

COOL Days was based at Clare College, the second oldest of the 31 historic Cambridge Colleges. We started off our packed schedule full of lightning talks, partner workshops and team building with a meal at Millworks on the Monday evening (famous for it’s delicious Shawarma!)

The Technical Day

Is it possible to fit 45 lightning talks into one day? Yes!

We were live from Cambridge all day on Tuesday 28th March. It was wonderful to see so many presentations of all the work that’s been developing over the last 6 months by the Collabora Online team, community and partners all across Europe and beyond.

For those that would like to re-watch our COOL Days live stream, you can find it on our YouTube channel.
To download the slides from the Technical Talks, head to our github.

 

Partner Day

Wednesday 29th March was our Partner Day, full of workshops and discussions around our collaborative Partner Programme. It was a privilege to have Simon Phipps and Robert Riemann kick off the day with their insights into the importance of data protection in Europe and future of open source.

Throughout the rest of the day we had many open discussions with our Partners about how we can support them and work together even more successfully and talked about the development road map for 2023.

 

LibreOffice Technology Hackfest

On Wednesday 29th March we also held a Hackfest for those who are involved in the LibreOffice Technology community. Many hours were spent hacking in person, learning from one another and solving bugs with other members of the community.

 

Social Events

We made sure there were plenty of opportunities for team building including a treasure hunt around Cambridge, punting down the river Cam and of course, some delicious meals together. On the final evening we dined at Ridley Hall which for many, gave them a taster of what dining at Hogwarts might be like – minus the owls!

 

You may have seen some of our team live tweeting from the event – search #COOLDays and follow us on Twitter, Mastodon and Linkedin to see updates from events and conferences throughout the year.

We hope to see you at our next COOL Days event.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for where we’ll be next:

COOL Days

April 8-10, 2024 – Cambridge, UK

Nextcloud Enterprise Day

April 24, 2024 – Munich, Germany

OW2Con

June 11-12, 2024 – Paris, France

Collabora Productivity at FOSDEM 2023

FOSDEM 2023 – Back in Brussels

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.

 

 

 

Szymon Kłos

 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.

 

Pedro Pinto Silva

 18:10 LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

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.

 

 

About Collabora Online

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.

 

Collabora’s Contributions to the LibreOffice Conference 2022 in Milan

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.

 

 

Meet Abi – Collabora Software Engineering Intern

Collabora recruits interns to work over the summer alongside our team, and to build experience to help them assess whether they want to pursue a career in Software Engineering, but how does that work out? Meet Abi, mentored by Mert and Pedro, and intern behind the new SDK example in .NET¹. Lets hear from her:

Tell me about yourself!

I’m Abi, I’m studying Maths, Physics, Computer Studies and Media Studies at sixth form. I’ve been involved with the Army Cadets since 2017 and hope to join the Army Cyber Warfare Division after university.

When did you first become interested in coding?

I’ve grown up in a household that’s centralised around technology and found a passion for coding when studying Maths – I found I was quite good at it! I really enjoy the theory side of Computer Science, learning algorithms and how things are put together. I realised this more through the work I did at Collabora.

What’s your favourite project you’ve worked on?

I love to start new projects but often find I don’t quite finish them! I either get stuck or I just don’t have time to finish them before I’ve started a new one. Working at Collabora, I actually managed to finish my projects which is a big achievement I hope to continue with.

What have you been doing over the Summer?

It’s been a mixture of school work, camping holidays along the Norfolk coast and doing the Collabora Internship.

What have you been working on?

I’ve been creating an SDK example with .NET.

What is SDK? How can that be useful?

It’s a basic version of the Collabora Online space using a different framework. If someone wanted to start building on COOL in a certain language, they can start to understand how the communication happens between the server and the computer it’s run on. Then they can build what they need on top of it in a multitude of languages.

Why did you want to spend your Summer at Collabora?

I mainly wanted to gain experience so I could make sure I was going into the right career path. I also wanted to do it because it would look good on my university application and personal statement.

What did you learn from your time at Collabora?

How to learn by myself but also when to ask for help when needed. I really learnt a lot about what I need to work on as both a Software Engineer and as a person so I can grow in both areas. It’s also the first time I’ve felt I’ve fully understood a (programming) language, which has given me more confidence.

Would you recommend an internship at Collabora to others interested in a career in technology?

Definitely! I think it was a good learning experience – it taught me personally what I want, and gave me a good insight into what a professional setting is like compared to an academic environment.

 

It’s great to see Abi’s work merged as a fresh new SDK example and to see how she has grown over the Summer.

Why not get involved? We love to work alongside the next generation to help them discover what a career in Software Engineering might look like. If you’ve ever considered it for yourself, get in touch today!

It’s a Wrap! COOL Days 2022 was a Sky High Success!

 

Thank you to all who attended our COOL Days meet up in Berlin on 3rd-5th October. We had a great time organising this for our Partners, Collabora team and open source community. It was a great success and we can’t wait to do it again!

If you didn’t manage to make it this time, check out our first YouTube short which shows a 2 minute overview of our amazing time in Berlin.


Community Day

On the Monday 3rd October we had our Collabora Productivity Community Team Building Day. This was a great chance to meet some of our Partners, and for the Collabora team to meet up after 3 years of travel restrictions. Many met in person for the first time and bonded over their love for retro computer games, competitive table football and the thrill of indoor skydiving!

Partner Day

Tuesday 4th October was our Partner Day, hosted at the Alexander Plaza Hotel. What a privilege it was to have Peter Ganten from Univention talk with us about his work to promote Digital Sovereignty, as well as hearing from members of the Collabora team about what we have been working on over the last year to build Collabora Online. We discussed the development road map for 2023 and had open discussions with our Partners about how we can support them and build closer relationships so we can work together even more successfully.

Meanwhile, the development community were taking part in a Hackfest at the bUm thanks to Nextcloud.

Technical Day

We all met at the bUm for our Technical Day on Wednesday 5th October. Some of our engineers, Partners and contributors presented lightning talks to show the latest developments happening at Collabora Online. It was a key chance for the community to speak directly with the engineers behind CODE and COOL, ask questions and input into the roadmap.

If you interested in seeing the slides from our lightning talks we’ve made them available on github:

COOL Days Slides

UX and Community Manager, Pedro, also blogged about our time there:

Pedro’s Blog

You may have seen some of our team live tweeting from the event – follow us on Twitter to see updates from events and conferences throughout the year.

 

We hope to see you at our next COOLDays event

 

Keep an eye out for where we’ll be next:

COOL Days

April 8-10, 2024 – Cambridge, UK

Nextcloud Enterprise Day

April 24, 2024 – Munich, Germany

OW2Con

June 11-12, 2024 – Paris, France