(First published 2018, SEHSCT went on to become a Collabora Office customer)
The South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust (SEHSCT) provides six hospitals in Northern Ireland with acute hospital services and community health and social services to 345,000 people, with a budget of just under £500 million and a staff of 8,500 with computer accounts. Microsoft Office licenses were due for renewal in 2018, at a cost of £145 per user each year.
For the Trust, these licenses would have cost in excess of £1.2 million a year.
Faced with the high cost of renewing its licenses for Microsoft Office, the SEHSCT began a feasibility study to examine the possibility of using Collabora Office.
“We’re happy with the software. It has been a real pleasure working with Collabora to fix our migration issues”
– Darren Henderson, SEHSCT
Financial Efficiency
The SEHSCT was going through a feasibility study, assessing the shift from Microsoft to Collabora Office. The motivation? Substantial savings on licenses – a vital consideration for institutions grappling with tight budgets. Collabora Productivity offers a highly competitive solution, with licenses costing a fraction of Microsoft Office’s annual license fee (£145 per user at the time).
Functional Parity and Beyond
Despite concerns about compatibility issues due to the vast number of applications used, Collabora Office proved itself by offering a reliable and functional alternative.
Ongoing Support and Adaptability
Collabora Productivity’s team demonstrated a commitment to addressing compatibility concerns promptly. The collaboration between the SEHSCT and Collabora Productivity ensured continuous improvement and adaptation to specific needs. With a modest annual fee, institutions can gain access to an extensive wealth of expertise. Collabora Productivity’s team, with decades of experience, provided unparalleled support to navigate migration challenges successfully.
Download the Full White Paper
Explore the full details of how Collabora Office and Online can enhance secure collaboration within healthcare institutions. Dive into the full white paper to uncover the benefits and insights.
Case Study
“Open Source helps students learn from home during lockdown”
Can you believe it, September 2023 marks the ten year anniversary since Collabora Productivity was incorporated?! It has been a brilliant decade, full of hard work, persistence, collaboration, growth, success and of course, fun!
We are so grateful to everyone who has supported, contributed and worked with us to make Collabora Online and Office the success it is today. Here are some of the team who have worked with Collabora Productivity along our journey so far. They come from an impressive range of countries, languages, tribes and tongues, we really love to work with the best people wherever they are based.
We loved to celebrate our 10 year anniversary with the LibreOffice community
Celebrations at the LibreOffice Conference 2023 in Bucharest, Romania
Thank you to all the coding engineers
It has been amazing over the years to work with 75 talented engineers working on developing the code-base, each one has made a significant improvement somewhere, from interns spending their summer with us, to developers who spent ten years making a huge impact – in alphabetical order:
Abigail Lowrie, Aditya Dewan, András Timár, Andrej Shadura, Andrew Lee (李健秋), Andrzej Hunt, Armin Le Grand, Áron Budea, Ashod Nakashian, Attila Szűcs, Caolán McNamara, Chris Sherlock, Christopher Gladman, Corentin Noël, Daniel Stone, Darshan Upadhyay, Dennis Francis, Emmanuel Gil Peyrot, Ezinne Nnamani, Faruk Uzun, Florin Ciornei, Gökay Şatır, Gopi Krishna Menon, George Wood, Grzegorz Araminowicz, Gülşah Köse, Henry Castro, Hubert Figuière, Iván Sánchez Ortega, Ivan Stefanenko, Jack Leigh, Jan Holešovsky, Jaume Pujantell Traserra, Justin Luth, Kohei Yoshida, László Németh, Lenny Horstink, Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne, Luboš Luňák, Lubosz Sarnecki, Luigi Iucci, Marco Cecchetti, Marc Rodrigues, Markus Mohrhard, Matúš Kukan, Mert Tümer, Mihai Varga, Mike Kaganski, Miklós Vajna, Muhammet Kara, Muthu Subramanian, Nick Wingate, Noel Grandin, Oli Baker, Olivier Hallot, Özcan Esen, Paris Oplopoios, Patrick Luby, Pedro Pinto Silva, Pranam Lashkari, Pranav Kant, Rashesh Padia, Sarper Akdemir, Shehr Bano, Skyler Grey, Szymon Kłos, Tamás Bunth, Tamás Zolnai, Thais Vieira, Tim-Philipp Müller, Tomaž Vajngerl, Tor Lillqvist, Ursache Vladimir, Will Thompson, Yunusemre Şentürk
Thank you to all the supporting team
Of course, it’s not just engineering – no company can run as smoothly as Collabora Productivity without a great team around them, its been great to have 41 people across many roles in Management, PoPs, HR, Finance, Marketing, Sysadmin…
Amélie Hanna, Anna Nazaryan, Asja Čandić, Ben Toynton, Cor Nouws, Deirdre Daly, Dorée Carrier, Elisa de Castro Guerra, Eloy Crespo, Ema Infate, Foad Vafaei, Hannah Greetham, Heidi Merrifield, Guy Lunardi, Iris Lee, Jassie Badion, Javier Llamas Mondragon, Jona Aziza, Julie Wilder, Lily Logua, Mark Filion, Mazin Alhaddad, Michael Meeks, Mike Dworski, Mitch Tester, Naomi Obbard, Niall McCarthy, Niamh Merrit, Philippe Kalaf, Richard Brock, Robert McQueen, Sam Tuke, Simon Lofthouse, Simon Napper, Stelios Milidonis, Swapnil Bhartiya, Tim Eyles, Timur Gadžo, Tina Lowe, Tracie Fabb, William Gathoye
Some of our team building events over the last 10 years included Sky Diving, High Ropes, Paddle Boarding, Punting…
Partners
Of course, we wouldn’t be where we are today without our partners. We currently have over 230 partners in 60 countries who work alongside us and integrate Collabora Online into their products. We’d like to thank them for their continued support and trust that has allowed us to grow to grow our businesses together.
We love to work with partners all over the globe
Customers
And to our customers, with some four million paying users, who have entrusted Collabora Productivity to provide their secure online office suite – it’s a privilege to be part of your business!
Community
We love to work alongside so many talented people in the community, with over one thousand four hundred (1400) individual developers committing alongside us to the underlying LibreOffice Technology code we build on over the last ten years, along with a huge number of translators and documentation, UX experts and more all across the world. Please do checkout their credits. We’re particularly grateful to those helping us out with Collabora Online, but for reasons of brevity omit this list of names – checkout the links.
Photos from many of the community events we’ve taken part in over the decade
What have we achieved?
Throughout the decade, Collabora Productivity has focused on supporting our users and giving back to the wider LibreOffice community. We have brought LibreOffice technology to the browser and mobile in an easy to consume way for everyone.
We have released over 31 major releases across LibreOffice-from-Collabora, Collabora Online, Collabora Office, Collabora Office for Mobile and Collabora Online Development Edition.
We have pushed 57,000 commits to LibreOffice and 21,000 to Collabora Online.
We’ve hosted 7 Team and Partner events; Bern in 2014, Brno in 2016, Tirana in 2018, Almeria in 2019. COOL Days, for our partners and community was born during the pandemic. The first was hosted online in 2021, and two in the subsequent years were held in person in Berlin and Cambridge.
Of course, no software is without support tickets, enabling us to assist our customers and partners to get setup, migrated and working smoothly with Collabora products. Over the last 10 years we have closed 3596 tickets – that’s an average of around ten per day, with 19 currently open.
While our primary focus is supporting our product customers, part of Collabora Productivity is our bespoke consultancy work. We have worked with a large number of companies to build better features, provide better interoperability and solve their specific problems, all the while contributing the work back into the wider community. You can read about some of our projects.
Some Special Thank Yous
Some special thank-yous are necessary for the many people behind the scenes who worked hard behind the scenes to make the original spin-out from SUSE a succes – thanks to: Brad Haque, Gerald Pfeifer, Marie Louise van Deutekom, Melanie Reichel, Michal Svec, Nils Brauckmann, Ralf Flaxa and Vojtech Pavlik
Then thanks to our first significant customers, partners and supporters:
It took a special person ten years ago to have faith in this small, new spin-out and to support our work while we went through our teething period as a new company. Many of these people also helped us with support, advice, practical experience in negotiation, and ultimately of course funding. Without them we would not be here today – you are much appreciated:
Daniel Aquilino, Kyle Beam, John Blanton, Jean-Pierre Bordes, William Bridwell, Kent Davison, Holger Dyroff, Fernand, Adam Fyne, Tsahi Glik, David Gümbel, Chris Hall, John Hunter, Frank Karlitschek, Jagan Lokanatha, Robert McCullough, Meir Morganstern, Jos Poortvliet, Anil Raut, Jim Routh, Darren Ruotolo, Robert Schulman, Kismat Singh, Niels Spanjers, Adam Paclt, Antonin Prukl
And finally, a huge set of partners, customers and key users who have contributed so much love, feedback, financial and moral support:
Thank you to all those who have helped to fuel the growth and success of Collabora Productivit from a business perspective over this decade – the full list of names would need to be far longer here, but here are the people that came immediately to mind; thank you !
Maria Alandes Pradillo, Birgit Becker, Ralf Becker, Thorsten Behrens, Maurizio Berti, Oliver Biewald, Jean-Romain Bouquet, Ulrich Brandner, Anthony Callahan, John Carberry, Antonio Chaac Velazquez Rincon, Nicolas Christener, Jan Christoph Dageförde, Denny Dahl, Holger Dyroff, Denny Ehrenberg, Stephan Feldhoff, Eric Ficheux, Vincent Francois, Peter Ganten, Jonas Garstick, Tobias Gerlinger, Peter Gietz, David Gillard, Mark Götting, Nico Gulden, Julius Härtl, Philippe Hemmel, Darren Henderson, Jerome Herledan, Thomas Hildmann, Thomas Hilstad, Timo Hirvonen, Teo Hirvonen, Lars Hoeger, Ali Işıngör, Mihajlo Joksimovic, Niall Keaveney, Nico Kossuch, Devadas Kovilakath, Ryan Kruse, Steve Kucia, Gerald Langisch, Marina Latini, Michiel Leenaars, Jérémie Lesage, Lucie Lesage, Fabian Liedtke, Javier Llamas Mondragón, Giuseppe Lo Presti, Leif Lohdahl, Patrick Maier, Marcel Meyer, Andrea Mörike, Julie Murphy, Robert Nijhof, Robert Nouwens, Jez Nuzum, Jos van den Oever, Olivier Paroz, Jean-François Pellier, Benoit Penicaut, Régis Perdreau, Andreas Rhode, Dave Richards, Bernd Rodler, Ulises Rodriguez, Björn Schieble, Paolo Storti, Mathias Supp, Jorg Thalmann, Sebastiaan Veld, Nicolas Vérité, Arnaud Versini, Christophe Villeneuve, Sean Wilson, Markus Windecker, Andrea Wörrlein, Michael Wuttke
If you read those lists and think – “wow, that’s a lot of people” – you can share our joy at each of the relationships, insights and contributions that we’ve brought into the company from them. There has been a staggering amount of work done.
Thanks too to everyone who has written about us in the media, liked our posts on social media, met us at a conference or event or just told their friends about Collabora. All of this has allowed us to keep doing what we love most – Making Open Source Rock! We’re excited about where we’re at, and are looking forward to another decade of fun!
The new Collabora Office 23.05 brings more features, improved performance and increased interoperability
Cambridge, August 7, 2023 – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Office 23.05.
Collabora Office, for Linux, Windows and Mac, is the enterprise version of the world’s most popular open-source office productivity suite, LibreOffice. It is the foundation for new versions of our online collaborative office, Collabora Online, and also powers our apps for iOS, Android and Chrome OS.
The enterprise office suite provides businesses and professionals a richly featured, secure document creation environment with Long-Term Support (LTS) and bespoke development services backed by decades of experience.
Collabora Office’s new release includes new features targeting three key areas: accessibility, interoperability and usability. Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in Collabora Office 23.05 and where you can download it.
Accessibility Features
Accessibility features are created to provide comfort to all users, for example, those who prefer to use just a keyboard, those who cannot see the screen very well or those who have impairments.
Dark Mode
Dark Mode has seen over 40 bug fixes and improvements and further support for switching between dark and light mode manually.
To toggle dark mode on and off:
Along the top navigation bar select: Tools → Options
Collabora Office → View → Appearance Mode: “System”, “Light”, “Dark”
Toggle between light and dark mode
Interoperability Features
For some time, users and organizations have faced a major challenge when trying to find an alternative to Microsoft’s widely-used productivity suite: the issue of file compatibility and interoperability. These improvements continue to build on our already solid base of excellent interoperability and are fully compatible across both the desktop and online versions of Collabora Office.
Document Themes
Document themes are predefined formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance, add your own branding and give it a consistent feel. They usually include a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text. When the formatting is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that formatting.
Themes also allows the user to choose between multiple default looks of objects when inserting and changing, which are derived from the current theme.
To apply a document theme:
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme’
Select the theme you’d like to apply
Press ‘Ok’
To create a document theme
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme → Add’
From here you can define colours for each part of your document.
Change and customise your Document Theme via a dialog box
Multi-page Floating Tables in Writer
This new feature is a combination of two existing capabilities. Multi-page tables and floating tables. Multi-page tables are tables than span their content over more than one page. Floating tables are tables inside a floating frame. This allows you to wrap text around them, which is particularly useful for brochures. Previously, it was not possible to combine these two features.
Floating frames used to work only on a single page. Now you can create floating tables that span across multiple pages. It improves interoperability with Microsoft’s OOXML format. It also significantly improves interoperability with tables that have been accidentally floated by users in Microsoft Office – often by just adjusting table sizing and positioning. This is frequently a problem in mis-designed Government forms – where tables are used for rendering borders, these should render and be editable with this update.
If you are interested in the complex technical challenges behind this feature, we encourage you to take a look into the series of posts by developer Miklos Vajna. There’s also a very insightful talk presented at COOL Days 2023 on YouTube. This feature is is still under active development, with some minor issues on specific use-cases to be ironed out, but you can make use of it in Collabora Office 23.05 now.
Multi-page Floating Tables in Collabora Office 23.05
Compact View of Pivot Tables
Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. Collabora Office can create and import Pivot Tables. The feature had first been introduced to in early 2021 together with numerous statistical tools. Meanwhile, the feature has seen further interoperability improvements. Collabora Office Calc is now able to preserve the more recent default compact Pivot Tables created in Excel. In addition to the more accurate visual representation, this improvement also avoids incorrect cell references.
Multi-Stop Gradients
Exciting improvements have been made to the under-the-hood renderer! Our rendering engine has been enhanced and can now handle even more complex gradients. You can now turn up the visual appeal of your document by incorporating multi-stop gradients into shapes, borders, and other elements. This update is essential for anyone who works with intricate graphics – bringing improvements and better interoperability for existing documents and making it easier to edit more complex designs and graphics.
Improved Frame Anchoring and Position
Collabora Office 23.05 includes improved compatibility with older document-framing descriptions including better positioning for frame handling, better support for combining/splitting frames and overlapping frames, fixes to some cases where parent styles were ignored, and fixes to avoid UI anchor changes that caused movement on the page.
64-bit Zip Support
The Zip64 standard extends numerous internal limitations in the XLSX and ODS formats used to compress documents. While the old zip limitations are enough for most practical user cases, documents with enormous amounts of content embedded could occasionally run into such limits. With support for Zip64 included in 23.05, editing and working with huge spreadsheets is now possible in Collabora Office. Zip64 also serves as a replacement – replacing the older standard for smaller files.
Zip64 support makes for exciting news for all, whether you’re a pro handling massive documents or a casual user who will surely benefit from the interoperability improvements! Everyone can expect improvements across the board.
Usability
Keyboard Navigation through Forms
You can use the tab key to circularly navigate through content controls and fieldmarks. The modern content controls have a tabIndex field, which allows for precise ordering of keyboard navigation. The tabIndex also allows a control to be skipped – which is useful to avoid getting stuck in rich text controls (since the tab key needs to insert a tab character in that case). Form developers can specify the tabIndex via the content control properties UI.
Navigate easily through forms using the tab key
Page Number Wizard
A wizard dialogue box has been added, combining inserting the required headers, footers, and page number fields into a single, easy to use, familiar dialog for users. This features all the common alignment options, support for a variety of languages, and a preview.
Simply select ‘Insert → Page Number...’
and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers, along with a preview. There are a variety of supported languages available.
To remove page numbers, simply delete the page number in one of the footers and it will remove the page numbers on all pages.
Insert page numbers with the new Page Number Wizard
Other New Features
New ‘plain text’, ‘combo box’ and titles and tags options in Content Controls.
Added support to open multi image TIFF files.
Auto fitting text scaling algorithm has been changed so it works similar to MS Office.
Categorized link targets when linking to a presentation.
Community
Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Office code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice Technology upon which Collabora Office, CODE and Collabora Online are built.
All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.
Here are some new features contributed by the LibreOffice community.
Typographical Editing
New optional hyphenation settings are available to give rules for adjusting text flow. You can now limit hyphenation within paragraphs, set a minimum word length for hyphenation and opt to not hyphenate the last word of a paragraph.
This work was done by László Németh, NISZ.
Typographical Editing Options
Change Tracking in Numbered Lists
When making changes within numbered lists, the numbering has now been fixed to show actual and original numbers within the document.
Example of new change tracking in numbered lists
Table Style Design Support
You can now modify table styles and create new ones in Impress and Draw. Modified styles are saved into documents, and can be shared via templates. You can access this function by right-clicking on a design in the Table Design Sidebar panel.
Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Office and Online empower users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.
Collabora Office is the latest enterprise release of our desktop office suite based on LibreOffice Technology, for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 23.05 provides businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and L3 support. Collabora is privileged to work with so many great contributors to the LibreOffice project and appreciates all the outstanding work done by so many that is included into Collabora Office 23.05. Our annual release, contains code that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. For a deep dive on all details and credits, please do take a look at the release notes.
It’s easy to migrate to Collabora Office 23.05 or try Collabora Office 23.05 for yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or download on the Windows or Mac App store.
If you would like to help test out the very latest Collabora Office versions before official release, you can download the development snapshots.
Cambridge, July 25, 2023 – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Online 23.05.
Collabora Online provides businesses a richly featured, collaborative and secure document creation environment with dedicated support backed by decades of experience. This new release includes new features targeting three key areas: accessibility, interoperability and usability.
Collabora Online 23.05 introduces a sleeker and more intuitive user interface, designed to simplify and optimise the user experience. With a clean and modern look, navigating through various applications, accessing essential tools and accessing new features has never been easier.
Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in COOL 23.05 and where you can download it.
Accessibility Features
Accessibility features are created to provide comfort to all users, for example, those who prefer to use just a keyboard, those who cannot see the screen very well or those who have impairments.
Dark Mode and Custom View Settings
Per view settings, allows us to render views differently – including various options such as showing non-printing characters or spell checking underlines in different views, in addition to Dark Mode.
As anyone who’s worked on an important proposal late into the night will tell you, staring at a bright screen and concentration don’t often go hand in hand. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce Collabora Online’s Dark Mode.
Dark Mode
Keyboard Shortcuts
The majority of computer users will use keyboard shortcuts to speed up their work and minimise the need to switch between different input devices. Previously, when collaboratively editing a file in Collabora Online, the shortcut settings were set to the language of the first user.
Now, the keyboard shortcuts have been expanded to allow all users to be able to use their own language’s keyboard shortcuts when editing a file collaboratively.
Another improvement to using keyboard shortcuts is the ability to hold the ‘Alt’ key to highlight your shortcut options for learnability.
Javascript Dialogs
We understand the importance of making software accessible to everyone. That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature that allows screen readers to access menus and dialogs. We have moved the dialog rendering to the client-side as JSDialogs, and converted all of our vex library usage to JSDialogs too, to enable higher accessibility.
This change will make it easier for those with visual impairments to navigate and interact with their documents through text-to-speech or braille displays. These accessibility wins bring benefits for everyone: in our previous releases we had 3 dialog types with 3 different looks. Now we have introduced a more consistent look across the board using JSDialogs.
Initial Screen Reading Support
Designed to assist users with visual impairments, this feature unlocks a world of possibilities, ensuring the visually impaired can participate in online collaboration.
Our initial enablement works in tabbed view mode and allows Writer to read paragraphs from the document as they are navigated through. When a user types, the screen reader reads the entered content.
For selections, after selecting ‘Hello’, the screen reader will typically say: “Hello, selected”. In the same way, if text is deselected, the screen reader reports the state change: “Hello, unselected”. Screen reading is a complex area that is best tuned to an individual users’s needs, and NVDA provides a rich palette of functions that can be toggled on or off. Moreover there are specific shortcuts for explicitly asking the NVDA screen reader to read the focused paragraph, the current text selection and so on.
This initial screen reader support is currently only supported for tabbed mode. Screen reader support is not enabled by default, since it is a resource consuming feature. It can be turned on by toggling within the UI (Help → Accessibility Support) or modifying the coolwsd.xml configuration file. Search for the accessibility section in coolwsd.xml and set the enable item to true.
Interoperability Features
For some time, users and organizations have faced a major challenge when trying to find an alternative to Microsoft’s widely-used productivity suite: the issue of file compatibility and interoperability. These improvements continue to build on our already solid base of excellent interoperability.
Document Themes
Document themes are predefined formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance, add your own branding and give it a consistent feel. They usually include a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text. When the formatting is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that formatting.
Themes also allows the user to choose between multiple default looks of objects when inserting and changing, which are derived from the current theme.
To apply a document theme:
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme’
Select the theme you’d like to apply
Press ‘Ok’
To create a document theme
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme → Add’
From here you can define colours for each part of your document.
Document Themes in Writer
Multi-page Floating Tables in Writer
This new feature is a combination of two existing capabilities. Multi-page tables and floating tables. Multi-page tables are tables than span their content over more than one page. Floating tables are tables inside a floating frame. This allows you to wrap text around them, which is particularly useful for brochures. Previously, it was not possible to combine these two features.
Floating frames used to work only on a single page. Now you can create floating tables that span across multiple pages. It improves interoperability with Microsoft’s OOXML format. It also significantly improves interoperability with tables that have been accidentally floated by users in Microsoft Office – often by just adjusting table sizing and positioning. This is frequently a problem in mis-designed Government forms – where tables are used for rendering borders, these should render and be editable with this update.
If you are interested in the complex technical challenges behind this feature, we encourage you to take a look into the series of posts by developer Miklos Vajna. There’s also a very insightful talk presented at COOL Days 2023 on YouTube. This feature is is still under active development, with some minor issues on specific use-cases to be ironed out, but you can make use of it in COOL 23.05 now.
Multi-page Floating Tables
Compact View of Pivot Tables
Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. Collabora Online can create and import Pivot Tables. The feature had first been introduced to Online in early 2021 together with numerous statistical tools. Meanwhile, the feature has seen further interoperability improvements. Collabora Online Calc is now able to preserve the more recent Excel default of compact Pivot Tables created in Excel. In addition to the more accurate visual representation, this improvement also avoids incorrect cell references.
Multi-Stop Gradients
Exciting improvements have been made to the under-the-hood renderer! Our rendering engine has been enhanced and can now handle even more complex gradients. You can now turn up the visual appeal of your document by incorporating multi-stop gradients into shapes, borders, and other elements. This update is essential for anyone who works with intricate graphics – bringing improvements and better interoperability for existing documents and making it easier to collaborate on more complex designs and graphics.
Improved Frame Anchoring and Position
COOL 23.05 includes improved compatibility with older document-framing descriptions including better positioning for frame handling, better support for combining/splitting frames and overlapping frames, fixes to some cases where parent styles were ignored, and fixes to avoid UI anchor changes that caused movement on the page.
64-bit Zip Support
The Zip64 standard extends numerous internal limitations in the XLSX and ODS formats used to compress documents. While the old zip limitations are enough for most practical user cases, documents with enormous amounts of content embedded could occasionally run into such limits. With support for Zip64 included in 23.05, editing and working with huge spreadsheets is now possible in Collabora Online. Zip64 also serves as a replacement – replacing the older standard for smaller files.
Zip64 support makes for exciting news for all, whether you’re a pro handling massive documents or a casual user who will surely benefit from the interoperability improvements! Everyone can expect improvements across the board.
Usability
Page Navigation
Page navigation plays a crucial role in enhancing the user experience, especially when creating large documents in Writer. It allows users to move seamlessly between sections, structure their documents and find the content they are searching for easily within complex documents.
The existing navigator functionality will now be viewable in the sidebar, allowing you to jump to each section by simply double clicking the headings. You can find this by clicking ‘View → Navigator’ and it will appear in the sidebar. From here you can jump to headings, tables, images, hyperlinks and more.
Navigating through Writer Documents
Simple Page Number Insertion
A wizard dialogue box has been added, combining inserting the required headers, footers, and page number fields into a single, easy to use, familiar dialog for users.
This features all the common alignment options, support for a variety of languages, and a preview.
Simply select ‘Insert → Page Numbers’ and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers. There are a variety of supported languages available including Asian and Cyrillic styles.
To remove page numbers, simply delete the page number in one of the footers and it will remove the page numbers on all pages.
Simple Insertion of Page Numbers
Impress Hidden Slides
Impress introduces a new feature. Now a user can hide and show slides on the Slide Pane by right clicking and choosing ‘Hide Slide’ or ‘Show Slide’. They will then shown or hidden throughout the full screen presentation.
Show and Hide Slides in Impress
Core New Features Introduced in 22.05 Updates
Since the major release of COOL22.05 in June 2022, many new features have been introduced throughout the year. These have had extensive testing and are now officially core features of Collabora Online 23.05.
Improved Hyperlink Pop-ups
The Collabora Online UI sees constant updates, improving the experience based on user feedback. One of the obvious changes can be seen in the way hyperlinks are handled in documents. Now, when clicking on a hyperlink, a small pop-up dialog appears, allowing several options. You can click the URL to follow the link (a pop-up will warn you, if you are leaving for an external page), you can copy the link, edit or delete it. The new and improved hyperlink pop-ups are available for all modules of Collabora Online and do significantly improve the handling of links – especially inside spreadsheets.
Improved Hyperlink Editing
In Nextcloud, you can also see a small link preview of the URL which can help when searching through links.
Image Preview of Hyperlinks
Reference Management and Bibliographic Data with Zotero
Zotero is an open-source reference management software allowing users to manage bibliographic data and related research materials. It allows users to share bibliography libraries and notes, choosing from different citation styles. Collabora Online can now browse all the existing records of one’s Zotero library, enabling users to insert, remove, and refresh references, citations, and notes or to automatically generate bibliographies. This makes Collabora Online an excellent solution for research and academia alike.
Users will need to enter a valid Zotero API key into their office settings, if you don’t see a setting there – why not encourage your integrator to add it: it should be easy. More details on the Zotero plug-in are available on our blog. We hope to see more Collabora Online integrators making this feature available soon.
Add Citations with Zotero
AI Based Translations with DeepL
DeepL is a leading AI company based in Germany. It offers the DeepL Translator, a translation tool based on a machine learning model that is trained by a large team of linguists. The plug-in is connected to the DeepL API and makes these high-quality translations available directly in Collabora Online without having to leave the document you are working on. To make use of it, it will need to be configured inside coolwsd.xml. Find out more about it on our blog or in the Collabora Online SDK. Once the feature is enabled, translating text inside a Writer document is as easy as selecting it, clicking the “Translate” button and choosing the target language from dialog.
Translations Using DeepL
PDF & EPUB Export Options
Previously PDF was from exported with default settings from Writer. Now we have a tabbed dialog full of options, including accessibility, permissions, image quality and more. Similarly to PDF export, we enabled the EPUB export options dialog in Collabora Online. EPUB is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based e-book format.
Community
Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Online code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice Technology upon which CODE and Collabora Online are built.
All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.
Typographical Editing
New optional hyphenation settings are available to give rules for adjusting text flow. You can now limit hyphenation within paragraphs, set a minimum word length for hyphenation and opt to not hyphenate the last word of a paragraph.
You can now modify table styles and create new ones in Impress and Draw. Modified styles are saved into documents, and can be shared via templates. You can access this function by right-clicking on a design in the Table Design Sidebar panel.
Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Online empowers users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.
Collabora Online 23.05 is the latest enterprise release of our widely integrated, secure office suite. It is suitable for large-scale deployment and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates and the ability to help direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many other major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organisations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control of them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host COOL on your own hardware or integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty and GDPR compliance. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our Partner’s integrations and try an online demo. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner.
Collabora Productivity Unveils Highly Anticipated Update to CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), Empowering Users with Enhanced Productivity and Collaboration Features
Cambridge, June 13, 2023 at 13:00 CEST – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Office Development Edition (CODE) 23.05. CODE is the free developer version of our enterprise version, Collabora Online, and includes all the features and enhancements that will be available in Collabora Online 23.05. CODE is targeted at home users and technology enthusiasts, and for those, it is a low-threshold way to get involved and familiar with our online office solution. CODE will be improved continuously and our next supported and maintained Collabora Online product will be built from it. The code is freely available on GitHub.
Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in CODE 23.05, as well as how to install the latest version.
Collabora Online Development Edition introduces a sleeker and more intuitive user interface, designed to simplify and optimise the user experience. With a clean and modern look, navigating through various applications and accessing essential tools has never been easier.
Accessibility Features
Keyboard Shortcuts
The majority of computer users will use keyboard shortcuts to speed up their work and minimise the need to switch between different input devices. Previously, when collaboratively editing a file in CODE, the shortcut settings were set to the language of the first user.
Now, the keyboard shortcuts have been expanded to allow all users to be able to use their own language’s keyboard shortcuts when editing a file collaboratively.
Another improvement to using keyboard shortcuts is the ability to hold the ‘Alt’ key to highlight your options for learnability.
Page Navigation
Page navigation plays a crucial role in enhancing the user experience, especially when creating large documents in Writer. It allows users to move seamlessly between sections, structure their documents and find the content they are searching for easily within complex documents.
The existing navigator functionality will now be viewable in the sidebar, allowing you to jump to each section by simply double clicking the headings. You can find this by clicking ‘View → Navigator’ and it will appear in the sidebar. From here you can jump to headings, tables, images, hyperlinks and more.
Navigate through documents easily in CODE 22.05
JSDialogs
We understand the importance of making software accessible to everyone. That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature that allows screen readers to access menus and dialogs. We have moved the rendering of the dialog rendering to the client-side as JSDialogs, and converted all of our vex library usage to JSDialogs too, to enable higher accessibility.
This change will make it easier for those with impairments to navigate and interact with their documents through text-to-speech or braille displays. We hope this change helps create more inclusive software, and we will continue to strive to provide software that is universally accessible to everyone.
These accessibility wins bring benefits for everyone: in our previous releases we had 3 dialog types with 3 different looks. Now we have introduced a uniform look across the board using JSDialogs.
WAI-ARIA Annotation
WAI-ARIA, the Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies.
To enable screen readers to be able to read our user interface the WAI-ARIA annotations ensure that users know not only what text is currently displayed on-screen, but also the function of each part of the screen. Assigning ‘roles’ to html elements enables screen readers to know how to interact with a page. For example whether text is a hyperlink or a certain box is clickable or not may be immediately obvious to most users, for those with visual disabilities this may not be the case. By adding ARIA roles to elements, we can allow the screen reader to present the end user any additional information.
WAI ARIA annotation is currently available in compact mode.
Initial Screen Reading Support
Designed to assist users with visual impairments, this feature unlocks a world of possibilities, ensuring everyone can participate fully in online collaboration.
Our initial enablement allows writer to read paragraphs from the document as they are navigated through. When user types the screen reader reads the entered content.
For selections, after selecting ‘Hello’, the screen reader will typically say: “Hello selected”. In the same way, if text is deselected, the screen reader reports the state change: “Hello unselected”. Screen reading is a complex area that is best tuned to an individual users’s needs, and NVDA provides a rich palette of functions that can be toggled on or off.
Moreover there are specific shortcut for asking explicitly the NVDA screen read for reading the focused paragraph, the current text selection and so on. This function
Initial screen reader support is currently available in compact mode. Screen reader support is not enabled by default, since it is a resource consuming feature. It can be turned on by modifying the coolwsd.xml configuration file. Search for the accessibility section in coolwsd.xml and set the enable item to true.
Dark Mode and Custom View Settings
Per view settings, allows us to render views differently – including various options such as showing non-printing characters or spell checking underlines in different views, in addition to Dark Mode.
As anyone who’s worked on an important proposal late into the night will tell you, staring at a bright screen and concentration don’t often go hand in hand. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce Collabora Online’s Dark Mode.
Dark mode selector menuDark mode menu items
Interoperability Features
For some time, users and organizations have faced a major challenge when trying to find an alternative to Microsoft’s widely-used productivity suite: the issue of file compatibility and interoperability. These improvements continue to build on our already solid base, and we will continue to strive to offer the best possible level of compatibility in the office suite market.
Multi-Stop Gradients
Exciting improvements have been made to the under-the-hood renderer! Our rendering engine has been enhanced and can now handle even more complex gradients. You can now turn up the visual appeal of your document by incorporating multi-stop gradients into shapes, borders, and other elements. This update is essential for anyone who works with intricate graphics – bringing improvements and better interoperability for existing documents and making it easier to collaborate on more complex designs and graphics.
It has been great to work with allotropia on this excellent feature.
Multi-stop gradients in 22.05
Multi-stop gradients in 23.05
64-bit Zip Support
The Zip64 standard extends numerous internal limitations in the XLSX and ODS formats used to compress documents. While the old zip limitations are enough for most practical user cases, documents with enormous amounts of content embedded could occasionally run into such limits. With support for Zip64 included in 23.05, editing and working with huge spreadsheets is now possible in Collabora Online. Zip64 also serves as a replacement – replacing the older standard for smaller files.
Zip64 support makes for exciting news for all, whether you’re a pro handling massive documents or a casual user who will surely benefit from the interoperability improvements! Everyone can expect improvements across the board.
Compact View of Pivot Tables
Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. Collabora Online can create and import Pivot Tables. The feature had first been introduced to Online in early 2021 together with numerous statistical tools. Meanwhile, the feature has seen further interoperability improvements. Collabora Online Calc is now able to preserve the more recent Excel default of compact Pivot Tables created in Excel. In addition to the more accurate visual representation, this improvement can also avoids incorrect cell references.
Document Themes
Document themes are predefined styles and formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance and give it a consistent style. It usually includes a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text, as well as sizing, alignment, indentation, spacing and other visual effects. When the format of the style is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that style.
To apply a document theme:
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme’
Select the theme you’d like to apply
Press ‘Ok’
To create a document theme
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme → Add’
From here you can define colours for each part of your document.
Change the Style of Your Documents in One Click
Multi-page Floating Tables in Writer
This new feature is a combination of two existing capabilities. Multi-page tables and floating tables. Multi-page tables are tables than span their content over more than one page. Floating tables are tables inside a floating frame. This allows you to wrap text around them, which is particularly useful for brochures. Previously, it was not possible to combine these two features.
Floating frames used to work only on a single page. Now you can create floating tables that span across multiple pages. This feature has been primarily developed for Collabora Online, but is useful on the desktop version, Collabora Office, too. It improves interoperability with Microsoft’s OOXML format. It also significantly improves interoperability with tables that have been accidentally floated by users in Microsoft Office – often by just adjusting table sizing and positioning. This is frequently a problem in mis-designed Government forms – where tables are used for rendering borders, these should render and be editable with this update.
If you are interested in the complex technical challenges behind this feature, we encourage you to take a look into the series of posts by developer Miklos Vajna. There’s also a very insightful talk presented at COOL Days 2023 on YouTube. This feature is is still under active development, with some minor issues on specific use-cases to be ironed out, but you can make use of it in CODE 23.05 now.
Tables Are Now Optimised to Span Multiple Pages
Improved Frame Anchoring and Position
CODE 23.05 includes improved compatibility with older document-framing descriptions including better positioning for frame handling, better support for combining/splitting frames and overlapping frames, fixes to some cases where parent styles were ignored, and fixes to avoid UI anchor changes that caused movement on the page.
Ergonomics
Simple Page Number Insertion
A wizard dialogue box has been added, combining inserting the required headers, footers, and page number fields into a single, easy to use, familiar dialog for users.
This features all the common alignment options, support for a variety of languages, and a preview.
Simply select ‘Insert → Page Numbers’
and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers. There are a variety of supported languages available including Asian and Cyrillic styles.
Core New Features Introduced in 22.05 Updates
Since the major release of CODE 22.05 in June 2022, many new features have been introduced throughout the year. These have had extensive testing and are now officially core features of 23.05.
Choosing the citation style before inserting a first citation with Zotero in Collabora Online
Reference Management and Bibliographic Data with Zotero
Zotero is an open-source reference management software allowing users to manage bibliographic data and related research materials. It allows users to share bibliography libraries and notes, choosing from different citation styles. Collabora Online can now browse all the existing records of one’s Zotero library, enabling users to insert, remove, and refresh references, citations, and notes or to automatically generate bibliographies. This makes Collabora Online an excellent solution for research and academia alike.
This is currently a Nextcloud exlusive feature. Users will need to enter a valid Zotero API key into their office settings. More details on the Zotero plug-in are available on our blog. We hope to see more Collabora Online integrators making this feature available soon.
AI Based Translations with DeepL
DeepL is a leading AI company based in Germany. It offers the DeepL Translator, a translation tool based on a machine learning model that is trained by a large team of linguists. The plug-in is connected to the DeepL API and makes these high-quality translations available directly in Collabora Online without having to leave the document you are working on. To make use of it, it will need to be configured inside coolwsd.xml. Find out more about it on our blog or in the Collabora Online SDK. Once the feature is enabled, translating text inside a Writer document is as easy as selecting it, clicking the “Translate” button and choosing the target language from dialog.
1. Select the text
2. Click the Translate button
3. Select the target language
Improved Hyperlink Pop-ups
The Collabora Online UI sees constant updates, improving the experience based on user feedback. One of the obvious changes can be seen in the way hyperlinks are handled in documents. Now, when clicking on a hyperlink, a small pop-up dialog appears, allowing several options. You can click the URL to follow the link (a pop-up will warn you, if you are leaving for an external page), you can copy the link, edit or delete it. The new and improved hyperlink pop-ups are available for all modules of Collabora Online and do significantly improve the handling of links – especially inside spreadsheets.
Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Online code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice Technology upon which CODE and Collabora Online are built.
All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.
Typographical Editing
New optional hyphenation settings are available to give rules for adjusting text flow. You can now limit hyphenation within paragraphs, set a minimum word length for hyphenation and opt to not hyphenate the last word of a paragraph.
Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Online empowers users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.
The South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust (SEHSCT) provides six hospitals in Northern Ireland with acute hospital services and community health and social services to 345,000 people, with a budget of just under £500 million and a staff of 8,500 with computer accounts. Microsoft Office licenses were due for renewal in 2018, at a cost of £145 per user each year.
