Collabora at the Univention Summit 2023

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!

 

 

We had many great talks at the Univention Summit…
…showcasing the technical capabilities of Collabora Online.
Find more pictures from the summit in Univention’s blog!

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 Online Partners with Exzatech

Cambridge, United Kingdom – Bangalore, India – 01 November 2022

Collabora, the developers behind Collabora Online, and Exzatech Consulting, an IT and software solution provider focusing on security and enhanced business performance, are happy to announce a partnership integrating Collabora Online and Exzatech’s ‘Ndryve’ collaborative workspace.

We are pleased to be Partnering with Exzatech and increasing our offering in Asia.” said Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity. “We love to work with Partners who place value in providing businesses with data privacy and have a great vision for their technology.”

Collabora Online now available in Ndryve

Exzatech provides Ndryve, an enterprise-ready, remote-friendly, “Content Collaboration Workspace” with a focus on data protection and security. Providing a range of benefits for all types of businesses including Government and Healthcare, Ndryve also hosts unique features for research and academic institutions.

Ndryve offers traditional on-premises, hybrid managed or fully cloud-hosted content collaboration workspaces. Their technology combines the ease of consumer-grade solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive, with the security, privacy and control of individual business’ needs.

Collabora Online is a powerful online office suite that supports all major document, spreadsheet and presentation file formats which can be easily integrated in many infrastructures and solutions. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file format support.

Collabora Online is excellent for enterprises that need a powerful office suite in the cloud, or on-premises, that protects their privacy and allows them to keep full control of their sensitive corporate data. Collabora Online enables Hosting and Cloud businesses to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offerings.

“We are happy to now be offering Collabora Online as an integration in Ndryve, giving our customers the ability to integrate a full-featured, flexible, collaborative workspace across desktop and mobile.” says Anantha Raghava, Chief Executive Officer of Exzatech Consulting.

About Exzatech Consulting

Exzatech combines flexibility and creativity to provide strategic guidance and innovative solutions to their clients. Their vendor-agnostic approach gives them the ability to provide the most suitable analysis, advice, and solutions for each business. Over the years, they have deployed adaptable and innovative solutions for a number of leading BFSI, government, and enterprise clients that have improved operations, secured networks, saved costs, and enhanced business performance.

“As individuals, we are just like anyone else. But as a team, we are a powerhouse of knowledge, skills, and ideas. With decades’ worth of business and technology experience under our wings, we have built a formidable presence as a much sought after IT and software solution provider in India and abroad.” says Exzatech.

For more information visit www.exzatechconsulting.com/ndryve

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.

Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS and Android. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

Free Collabora Online Demo

Collabora Online Unlocks the OpenPOWER Architecture

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

 

Talks and Slides by Collabora at FOSDEM 2022

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!

 

 

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!

 

 

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.

 

Homeworking and the Role of Open Software in 2022


As most will agree, it’s been an unusual two years as the Covid pandemic has transformed society and ushered in new approaches and attitudes to the way we work, such as homeworking.

Impact of the Pandemic and Homeworking

In this blog we talk to Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity, to get his take on the business impact of the pandemic, the rise in homeworking and the ongoing pressure on organisations to enable and support effective distributed team collaboration and secure data sharing.

Discussing how the pandemic directly impacted Collabora Online, Michael explained that Collabora had always been a very virtual business so homeworking was nothing new.

“We utilise the skills and expertise of people from around the world, so distributed working is a necessity for us. Similarly, from a sales perspective, the pandemic, fortunately, has not been disruptive as it has for many other businesses. In fact, our sales over the last two years have increased significantly, which is possibly a direct result of organisations needing to respond to homeworking.”

Michael explained that they’d seen a growing number of businesses turning to Collabora Online as a way of solving urgent operational gaps brought about by the closure of offices.

“For many organisations, simply extending office-based solutions into the homes of their staff was either too expensive or technically too difficult.”

Tried and Tested Collaboration Solution

Collabora Online presented a tried and tested alternative to the commonly used office document solutions. Not only did it offer a familiar ‘desktop’ look and feel, which is important when trying to maintain productivity levels, but it was easy to deploy within a web/browser-based distributed environment, so it answered many of the issues business decision makers were asking when extending the working environment into a less-controllable domestic setting.

Michael said:

“We regularly talked with decision makers who recognised the urgency of homeworking, but were, understandably, concerned about operational implications, such as productivity, data security and legislative compliance.” He continued: “Given the way Collabora Online is built on the LibraOffice common core, we could provide a feature-rich, distributed office document collaboration solution that was tried and tested, and already optimised for the demands of the homeworking environment.”

Throughout the pandemic, and beyond, Collabora Online was, and is, being used by serious, tech-savvy organisations that need a document collaboration solution that not only provides more control over every aspect of its operation, such as the servers and networking it is hosted on, but greater security over the, often sensitive, data exchanged and stored in office documents.

Collabora Online, Office Productivity Market and Open Software in 2022

So as we move towards greater levels of ‘normality’ what does 2022 look like for Collabora Online, the office productivity market and open software in general?

“I think homeworking is here to stay,” suggested Michael.

“This long-term transition has clearly been accelerated by the pandemic, but you could argue that as the search continued for a better work/life balance, it would have come about sooner or later. As such, more and more organisations will be looking for solutions, such as Collabora Online, that are already optimised for a distributed working environment. Homeworking can come with its own challenges, especially when problems arise. In these circumstances, businesses need to be confident they can quickly and easily get the support they need, when they need it, which they can from us at Collabora.”

With regards to the open software market, Michael was very positive:

“Open Source software is everywhere now and is dominant in new product development, and although a tension can occur with commercial drivers that sometimes encourage bad practices, such as a reluctance to contribute back to the overall open software community, most of those involved get it and understand the huge benefits working with Open Source can deliver”

So 2022 looks like an exciting year for Collabora Online as it continues to respond to the evolving needs of a distributed, increasingly security-aware market, with end users keen to protect their flexibility and avoid getting tied to one dominant supplier.