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

Talks and Slides by Collabora Productivity at FOSDEM 2023

FOSDEM 2023 – The Talks and Slides from the Collabora Productivity Team

FOSDEM has returned to Brussels! It was great meeting again in person on Europe’s largest open-source conference for developers and tech-enthusiasts. We’d like to express our gratitude to the community, the organizing team and the many volunteers that made this happen. The Collabora team gave numerous talks, mainly on the LibreOffice Technology track. Missed a presentation? Would you like to dig deeper? Please find the links to the videos and to the downloads of the slides below. Would you like to discuss with us on some of the technical topics? Meet us in the forum or join the discussions on GitHub!

 

Michael Meeks

Collaboration and Content Management devroom

Collaborating with Collabora Online – How to re-use Collabora in your work or project

Collabora Online brings LibreOffice technology to the browser and integrates with a large number of different Open Source products. Come and hear from Michael Meeks how you can plug into new APIs we have for Grammar checking (with LanguageTool), Bibliography Management (with Zotero), and translation integration (with DeepL). Hear how an integration can work, and the new SDK samples to build on that we provide to make things easy for developers. Also catch a glimpse of the many improvements to the product that we’ve made to improve collaboration performance, interactivity, as well as core LibreOffice technology pieces around intereoperability and performance. Hear about our plans around off-line in the browser, and ask any questions you have. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Pranam Lashkari

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Feature Locking and Feature Restriction – Integrator’s Way to Unlock Potential

In this talk, Pedro Silva presents Pranam Lashkari’s work on feature locking and restrictions in Collabora Online. Using such methods, integrators can control which features to deliver to which user or group. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Miklos Vajna

LibreOffice Technology devroom

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. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Sarper Akdemir

LibreOffice Technology devroom

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. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

Attila Szűcs

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Footnotes in Multi-column Sections

In this talk, Attila Szűcs showcased the fix a seemingly small bug, that became much more complex than expected, because of the differences between writer’s, and word’s multi-column footnote capabilities. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Paris Oplopoios

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Supporting Old Proprietary Graphic Formats

Some proprietary graphic formats from the 90s like WMF are device dependent and hard to support. The standard is hard to navigate and implement. See how WMF bugs are debugged, fixed and tested. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

 

Michael Meeks

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online Over Lockdown – How LibreOffice Technology in the Browser Got Better

Collabora Productivity’s CEO Michael Meeks showed 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. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Szymon Kłos

LibreOffice Technology devroom

LibreOfficeKit – Bridge Between Your Application and LibreOffice

Szymon Kłos gave a short introduction into integrating LibreOffice using LibreOfficeKit with external software. He described the most important code pieces and showed, where to look for information. He also demonstrated how to add new features, which API we provide, and what can be done with tiled rendering. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Pedro Pinto Silva

LibreOffice Technology devroom

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. Also, have a look at Pedro Pinto’s recap blog post to learn more about his FOSDEM experience. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Tor Lillqwist

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online and WASM – Assembling Off-line Collabora Online with the Web

Tor Lillqvist‘s talk showcased 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. See how this can be used to provide a fall-back (non-collaborative) editing mode for when you lose network connectivity, and about the plans to re-synchronize documents on the return from such a tunnel. See details

Watch the talk!

Download the slides!

Read more about FOSDEM from the team:

 

 

About Collabora Online

Collabora Online 22.05 is our latest enterprise quality 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.