Category: Company

Collabora Online Unlocks the OpenPOWER Architecture

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Cambridge, October 26, 2022. Collabora Productivity announces the availability of Collabora Online in the OpenPOWER architecture. Accessing this architecture makes our collaborative online office available on another group of powerful data centres and is the result of the young partnership with independent IT service provider 21unity, based in Dieburg, Germany.

Collabora Online Available on OpenPOWER

Starting with the release of the enterprise version 22.05.6, Collabora Online now supports the ppc64le architecture. The abbreviation describes the little-endian architecture provided by the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is based on the Power ISA instruction set. Power ISA is a successor to the PowerPC ISA developed by IBM for the microprocessor architecture of the corresponding name. The architecture is super-scalable and belongs to the family of Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC).

“We are pleased to bring our product to the Power platform”, says Michael Meeks, General Manager, Collabora Productivity. “We love to work with like-minded partners who build their business around open technologies.”

Benefits of the OpenPOWER Architecture

Unlocking the OpenPOWER architecture is a consistent step in our strategy to make Collabora Online available on all modern architectures and platforms while bearing the best possible performance in mind. It enables us to deliver our collaborative online office on an additional family of servers and data centres. The OpenPOWER architecture combines performance with high reliability. The openness of the technology is the key to the recent innovations in performance and energy efficiency. For the ppc64le platform, Collabora currently provides Ubuntu 20.04 packages and Docker images to customers and Partners.

21unity and Collabora Productivity Forge a Partnership

The availability of Collabora Online on the OpenPOWER architecture is the result of the fruitful partnership between the Dieburg-based IT service provider 21unity and Collabora Productivity, and was facilitated by the openness of the technology used. The OpenPower Foundation follows an open collaboration model for its technology, in which participating companies share technological innovations with each other – comparable to Collabora’s open-source software development. Collabora Online is based on LibreOffice technology – new features and enhancements that our developers create for our desktop suite are incorporated into the LibreOffice core alongside Collabora Online. 21unity offers the digitally sovereign online collaboration solution 21unity CLOUD as a new product on the OpenPOWER architecture. The offering consists of Nextcloud Enterprise for sharing files, writing email, and conducting chats and video conferences, and includes Collabora Online as a feature-rich, professional online office with outstanding interoperability.

“We are very pleased to be offering Collabora Online in our 21unity Cloud running on OpenPOWER”, says Yogi M. Schneider, CTO/CDO at 21unity. “It’s great to be able to offer the excellent features and interoperability to a wider user base.”

21unity operates the 21unity CLOUD from its own data centre with enterprise-class POWERServers in Dieburg, Germany.

About 21unity

21unity, based in Dieburg, specializes in customized IT solutions for companies. They are a cloud service provider and offer an “out-of-the-box” Nextcloud Enterprise with 21unity Collaboration Cloud and also created their own ERP system, which give the customers a full-fledged digital office experience. Their mission is to create easy-to-use, browser-based solutions for uncomplicated digital collaboration. In the area of system integration, they consider themselves not just a solution finder or developer, but an accelerator and trusted partner for digital transformation. The cloud offering provides a comprehensive collaboration office with the security of a German server location. The link with 21pro – a proprietary ERP – professionalizes the workflow in the process. Learn more at 21unitycloud.de

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online, an online office suite based on LibreOffice Technology. 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 codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

 

Free Collabora Online Demo

 

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

Naomi Obbard Leave a comment

 

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

COOL Days meetup in Berlin – community team building & partner day (October 3, 4 & 5)

Eloy Crespo Leave a comment

 

We are glad to announce that our next Collabora Productivity meetup for 2022 will be on October 3, October 4 and October 5 in Berlin, Germany.

There are some special events prepared for our partners and customers where you will hear about the latest work in Collabora Online and Office, be able to give your input to help develop our road map, meet the engineers and see how you can become part of the project, all while having fun with the Collabora team!

We have prepared three days with activities in Berlin, Germany – you just need to book your flight and join us! We will meet on October 3, with our first activity starting at 10am.

Collabora Community Team Building Day – October 3

We have prepared a day of awesome and unique activities for our partners and customers in Berlin.

10:00 – 12:30 – Computer Games Museum

Experience 60 years of gaming history and culture. The Computerspielemuseum contains over 300 exhibits, including rare originals, playable classics, and more!

We will meet at the Computerspielemuseum between 10 and 10.30am for 2 hours of retro gaming fun!

13:00 – Lunch & Indoor Skydiving at Windobona

Ever wanted to skydive? Now’s your chance!

  • An unforgettable experience with guidance from fully-certified instructors.
  • Open to everyone, whether you’re a first-timer or a pro!
  • Reach speeds of up to 180 km/h and imagine how it would feel to jump out of a real plane.
  • Spread your wings inside the 4.3m wide, 17m high, glazed flight chamber.
  • The indoor skydiving centre is located in the centre of the city and is easily accessible by public transport.

If you need to pay for these events yourself, please let us know – and significant others may also be included.

Collabora Partner Day & Hackfest – October 4

On October 4 our wonderful development community has a great opportunity to meet up, catch up, and work on problems together in-person at the bUm thanks to Nextcloud.

Meanwhile – we will have our Partner Day – this will take place at the Alexander Plaza Hotel – located in the centre of the city and is invitation only. Please send an e-mail to book a place before they’re all gone! (More booking info at the end.)

Program of the Business Day

Full details below – subject to change. All times displayed are CEST (UTC+2)

Time Topic Type By
09:30 Welcome to COOL Days Partner Day Opening Naomi Obbard
09:35 Digital Sovereignty: Building a Sustainable Marketing Strategy Strategy Peter Ganten, CEO Univention
10:20 Ensuring Digital Sovereignty with COOL Business Benefits Eloy Crespo
10:40 Ensuring Data Security with COOL Security Miklos Vajna
11:00 Break
11:30 Making Sense of the Last 2 Years: Collabora Online as a Response to the Mega-Trends of the 20’s Keynote Michael Meeks
12:00 Ensuring Covid Resilience with COOL Integration/Features Jan Holesovsky
12:20 Roadmap – Presentation & Discussion Talk/Discussion Michael Meeks
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Executive Round Table including Q&A Panel/Discussion
15:00 Brief Partner updates Feedback Partners
16:00 Wrap-up Close
16:15 Networking until dinner

There will be plenty of opportunity to find out more information on what Collabora is doing and where we are heading. You will also be able to meet the engineers and ask any questions. And of course, we will have snacks, drinks and lunch waiting for you there.

COOL Days “Technical day” – October 5

On October 5 we will have our Technical Day – the event will take place at the bUm.

This day is focused on providing the latest updates about our development, and we will have a whole round of lightning talks from our technical team and community. Come and listen to the latest from our top engineers and contributors about all the most important technical developments and challenges around Collabora Online. We will also have snacks and drinks waiting for you there.

Program of the Technical Day

Full details below – subject to change. All times displayed are CEST (UTC+2)

Time Topic By
10:00 Welcome to COOL Days Technical Day
10:10 (JS)Dialogs Conversion Status Szymon Klos
10:20 NextCloud Office Raul & Julius from NextCloud
10:30 DeepL Mert Tümer
10:40 Faster zstd Tiles Thanks to Facebook Michael Meeks
10:50 Design Improvements Pedro Silva
11:00 Break
11:30 PDF Export Mert Tümer
11:40 Re-vamped Save As Mert Tümer
11:50 Async Saving Cleanups Ash Nakashian
12:00 COOL Kubernetes Pranam Lashkari
12:10 Content Controls Miklos Vajna
12:20 Sparklines and Chart Data Tables Tomaz Vajngerl
12:30 Remote Control Configuration Rashesh Padia
12:40 iOS Improvements Tor Lillqvist
12:50 EGroupware and COOL Integration Birgit Becker
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Streaming Document Deltas Michael Meeks
14:10 Accessibility Checker Tomaz Vajngerl
14:20 Calc Formula Bar Szymon Klos
14:30 Tips on Debugging COOL Andras Timar
14:40 How to Use COOL Inside VNC Lagoon Andrea Wörrlein from VNC
14:50 Video Embedding Ash Nakashian
15:00 COOL and 1&1 Gabriel
15:10 Interoperability Improvements Gülşah Köse
15:20 Multi-host Configuration Jan Holesovsky
15:30 Giant Spreadsheets in Online Luboš Luňák
15:40 Using Cypress for Testing a Presentation Exported in SVG Marco Cecchetti
15:50 COOL Fonts Tor
16:00 File Properties Nick Wingate
16:10 LanguageTool Mert Tümer
16:20 Getting Involved and Overview of COOL Community Pedro Silva
16:30 Close

Get your ticket NOW to reserve your space!

Send an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com as soon as possible to get your name on our VIP list, as there is a limited number of places.

Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information or travel details.

In addition, if you’d like to give a ~five-minute lightning talk, send us an e-mail with Talk: in the subject line so we can arrange a slot for you.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Collabora Online – A Real Alternative

Richard Brock Leave a comment

Managing Change

As humans we’re bad at change; we much prefer what we know and actively protect the status quo. Like it or not, the uncertainty we’ve all experienced over the last two years has forced change upon us. This has challenged organisations to find real alternative solutions to new operational challenges, such as homeworking, and question many of the norms that had previously been ‘set in stone.’

For most organisations, office document functionality underpins their productivity. We’ve all relied on it for years without giving it much thought – it was ‘set in stone.’ Yes, software updates and improvements in functionality have been introduced over the years, but the basic environment has remained familiar, which has helped maintain productivity.

As its name suggests, office document software has been optimised for a traditional office environment. For most organisations pre-pandemic this meant manageable, predictable office buildings in which their staff gathered together to work. The need to enable and support widespread homeworking changed all of this.

What Had Been Relied On No Longer Worked So Well

Practically overnight, many organisations found that the office document software they had relied on for so long was not as suitable when used in a distributed, less-controllable, homeworking environment. In fact, many simply found it too difficult or too expensive to make it work! As a result, many needed to find an affordable solution that was quick and easy to implement, but, importantly, was familiar to their staff.

Commenting, Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity, said:

“Familiarity is so important when it comes to maintaining productivity. Staff in many organisations were already unsettled by their new homeworking reality so the introduction of a new look and feel to learn would have simply added to their uncertainty, and further undermined productivity.”

Collabora Online – A Real Alternative

Unlike many other reduced functionality office document solutions, Collabora Online provides a feature rich and familiar look and feel. Built on the Open Source LibreOffice Technology core, Collabora Online offers a real alternative for organisations experiencing problems with their existing office document solution. In addition to its  familiar look and feel, Collabora Online provides tried and tested collaboration functionality ideally suited to the demands of a homeworking environment.

Tip of the Spear

Migration away from any well-established application is never completely straightforward. After all, we don’t like change. But when faced with specific operational challenges, many organisations are finding that the introduction of Collabora Online is both straightforward and affordable. As such, it can represent the ‘tip of the spear’ for those looking to start or progress a wider migration strategy that enables them to address vendor lock-in, give greater control over data sovereignty as well as to protect data security, within a distributed working environment that looks here to stay.

Michael Meeks concluded:

“Reliance on a small number of dominant vendors is not inevitable! Office document migration is a realistic first step to prove the wider strategy and can help secure some important early wins, such as improved collaboration, better productivity and much greater control over distributed data. This is the best place to start getting your data back under your control.”

Talks and Slides by Collabora at FOSDEM 2022

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

FOSDEM 2022 – The Talks and Slides from the Collabora Team

Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like the last two years, FOSDEM is and remains the largest and most important gathering of Open-Source developers in Europe. We’d like to express our gratitude to the community and the organisers. The Collabora team gave numerous talks in the LibreOffice Technology devroom. Missed a presentation? Below you will find links to all videos and to the downloads of the slides.

 

Gülşah Köse

LibreOffice Technology devroom

OOXML Document Analysis

Collabora developer Gülşah Köse explains how we respond when we receive a problematic OOXML document from a customer and demonstrates the solution to a sample bug. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Miklos Vajna

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Document Themes in LibreOffice Impress and Elsewhere

LibreOffice has been capable of handling colour palettes on its UI for a while. Meanwhile, the competition introduced document themes, which are a fixed set of 12 colours, to be attached to various parts of documents. See what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice and find out what still needs doing and how you can help. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Gökay Şatır

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Canvas For Rendering UX

Gökay Şatır shows why we chose to use Canvas for rendering the UI and the document, and explains the structure we created to execute this task. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!


Mert Tümer

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Editing Simulation

Performance measurements are really challenging. This presentation by Mert Tümer covers how we can achieve reliable and repeatable performance tests by implementing clever tools that simulate realistic use cases. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Jan Holesovsky

LibreOffice Technology devroom

LibreOfficeKit Recent Developments

LibreOffice can be used by other applications via its C++ API called LibreOfficeKit. Primary use cases for this are document conversion and editing in Collabora Online. The LibreOfficeKit is currently being expanded. Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky talks about these recent developments See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Follow Collabora Office on YouTube

 

Michael Meeks

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Online Performance – Making Collaborative Editing Quicker

Collabora Online has a novel model that re-uses the core LibreOffice Technology to provide rich collaborative editing. Recently, we have been focusing our development on improving the look and feel of document editing. Watch Michael Meeks talk about how Online performance wins are making browser-based collaborative editing quicker. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Szymon Kłos

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Building Collabora Online UI Based on the LibreOffice Components

JSDialog is a “framework” for sharing UI components between Collabora Online and LibreOffice. It was used to bring the Sidebar, the NotebookBar, and dialogs to the web. It provides native HTML widgets connected to the original LibreOffice code, giving the user rich editing options even on mobile devices. Watch Szymon Kłos‘ talk for a brief summary of what has already been done and how it works. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Pranam Lashkari

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online on Kubernetes – Setup & Deployment

See this talk by Pranam Lashkari for a comprehensive demonstration of how to deploy Collabora Online using Kubernetes. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Ashod Nakashian

 16:00 – 16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online: Async-Saving Design and Testing

This talk explores the challenge of saving and uploading documents to the storage server in an asynchronous way, to improve performance, user experience and also ensure higher reliability and resiliency. Ashod Nakashian covers both the design and the challenges of testing a highly critical component of a production product.

See details Join video & conversation

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Henry Castro

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Macro Dialog Feature

Watch Henry Castro‘s talk on the implementation of a Macro Selector Dialog on the client side to execute VBA macros on the server side. See details

Watch the talk!
Download the slides!

 

Try the Collabora Online demo

 

About Collabora Online

Collabora Online 21.11 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.