Allowing students to have remote access, the choice of any device (smartphones, tablets, computers), advanced collaboration features around documents, and advanced sharing features including groups. These were the requirements of SIB, a major, global public actor of digital services, when looking at improving their service to 33.000 pupils and 2.500 teachers in 57 middle schools!
SIB found an ideal solution in Nextcloud and Collabora Online
SIB supports healthcare structures and public entities in their digital transformation. The organization provides infrastructure to teachers and pupils: computers, servers, hosted applications, networks and support.
In this specific case (get the full case study!), they have been working on taking their information systems to the next level for the Ille-et-Vilaine department, including middle schools.
“We prevent interoperability problems when students work from home
with Nextcloud and Collabora Online, which avoids the need for specific Microsoft Office versions”
Using Nextcloud and Collabora Online
The new solution allows up to 33.000 pupils and 2.500 teachers in 57 middle schools to work from home, inside Nextcloud Group Folders along with Collabora Online.
This way teachers don’t have the issue that they don’t have the right Microsoft Office version to read the students’ work which removes any interoperability problems between Microsoft versions.
Also teachers and directors of the schools use Collabora Online for sharing and collaboration on administrative tasks.
Thanks to our partner Nextcloud for their great work in this project and for their blog about this case study.
Great user feedback
Users welcomed Collabora Online inside Nextcloud and all the features with great enthusiasm: they loved the remote access to documents, online collaborative edition and the user-friendliness of the solution.
Some teachers already used online hosted solutions. For them, having the same experience hosted in Britanny by a security, privacy and protection-oriented public organization was a very positive experience. For users unfamiliar with those services, support and personal coaching was offered during migration phases. They gained experience with the functionality and used it innovatively with their pupils during class time.
Download the full case study
Case Study
“SIB delivering Nextcloud to 2500 teachers and 33000
pupils in Brittany, France”
Learn about the many performance improvements in CODE and Collabora Online 21.11
CODE 21.11 – announced yesterday – and of course also Collabora Online 21.11 bring together many performance improvements that we have been working on through the 6.4.x lifecycle as well as some more advanced optimizations. These are rather hard to screenshot for your viewing pleasure for obvious reasons, so please forgive some technical details and links to further reading for those interested. It is ongoing work; more about that at the end of this blog.
Asynchronous save
Collabora Online works hard to preserve your edits in the unlikely case of server-side failure. We regularly auto-save the document while users are editing, however in the past storing your document through to the back end storage had to be completed successfully before the user could continue typing. This could cause some jerkiness from time to time as people typed. Now this up-loading part of the saving is done asynchronously – i.e. in the background. For more technical details you can enjoy a talk on the design. For times when it is necessary to save synchronously such as during a save-as, we now provide animated user-feedback, color-coded according to the respective current application:
Accelerated JavaScript
Lots of work has been done first to profile, and then to optimize the performance of Collabora Online. Our profiles showed, somewhat surprisingly, that a lot of the scope for improvement was in the browser. As such we have significantly improved our websocket message handling, pixel processing and grouping of UI refreshes to give very significant interactivity improvements to more recent 6.4.x versions.
avoiding duplicate work (shown) by performing DOM updates after processing a batch of incoming events.
Moving more of the document to the client
Collabora Online 21.11 brings an understanding of text documents’ page positioning to the browser. That allows us to rendering page surrounds there avoiding a source of perceived flicker when moving up and down documents, and giving a smoother experience. This builds on more recent work in Calc to render worksheet backgrounds, and grid in the browser for similar reasons – giving slicker editing.
Improved spreadsheet performance in Calc
Collabora continues to put a lot of effort into enhancing the performance of our collaborative office suite. As an example, our streamlining of the Find & Replace functionality resulted in a massive performance boost. Also, opening speed of large XLSX files saw a some significant improvements. In Collabora Online 21.11, we have fundamentally revised the way spell checking is done in Calc with a new spell check that prevents continual re-rendering as strings are processed, while also caching spell-checking information, yielding considerable performance improvements. Similarly, AutoFilter searching has been optimized for large numbers of unique records.
Improved multi-user editing
One of the unfortunately pathological test-cases users like to do is to mash the keyboard – which generates text at around ten times the speed of a normal typist. Nevertheless this is something we have been optimizing along with scalability to larger numbers of concurrent editors of the same document. For more details checkout some insights into our ongoing work, or a deeply technical blog on optimizing for a larger number of users. Failing that – we have a video of a torture test of an intense multi-user editing session showing old, 6.4.x, and 21.11 versions from top to bottom:
Optimizing pathological loads – old/6.4.x/21.11
Ongoing work
We continue to work to profile and optimize uses-cases that are important to our users, the upcoming 21.11 micro-releases will exhibit more continuous improvement in this area – as well as ongoing improvements to our document pixel compression to make things even faster and lighter. It is well worth staying up-to-date with the latest releases.
Please try out CODE 21.11 and let us know of any workloads which you find have issues so that we may expand our internal testing & benchmarking to include them.
About Collabora Online
Collabora Online is the powerful LibreOffice-based online office that supports all major documents, spreadsheets and presentation file formats, which can all be easily integrated in many infrastructures and solutions. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file formatting 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 – built on LibreOffice Technology – enables Hosting and Cloud businesses to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offerings.
Le salon Open source Experience 2021 à Paris était un bel événement. Nous avons rencontré un grand nombre de personnes, mais aussi plusieurs partenaires de Collabora Online !
Si vous avez manqué le salon la semaine dernière à Paris, vous devriez envisager d’y aller l’année prochaine. Et si vous y êtes allé, il y a de fortes chances que vous ayez vu plusieurs partenaires actifs de Collabora Online ! Nous vous montrons le travail de cinq d’entre eux, qui aident leurs clients et nos utilisateurs de différentes manières.
Tout d’abord, commençons par féliciter :
L’équipe d’ Arawa qui a remporté le prix de la meilleure stratégie d’innovation Open Source à Paris ! Ils le méritent pour avoir aidé de nombreuses moyennes et grandets organisations ainsi que des administrations publiques à migrer et à se consolider sur l’open source.En savoir plus sur Arawa
Nous étions également heureux de voir le stand de Jeci . Ils travaillent dur sur la prochaine version de leur intégration Alfresco-Collabora Online.En savoir plus sur Jeci
Les personnes souhaitant un hébergement robuste de Collabora Online peuvent en trouver un bon chez Worteks, qui présentait ses dernières nouveautés à Paris.En savoir plus sur Worteks
D’une tout autre ampleur, et spécifiquement pour une gestion et un travail d’équipe Algoo proposait Tracim sur lequel Collabora Online s’intègre merveilleusement.En savoir plus sur Tracim
Enfin, nous avons été très heureux d’avoir été invités par Nextcloud afin de partager un stand à l’Open Source Experience Paris. Nous avons ainsi répondu à toutes les questions des visiteurs, réalisé des démonstrations de nos outils, offert des t-shirts, des autocollants et plus encore.
Les équipes de Nextcloud travaillent dur pour terminer leur prochaine version majeure, comprenant des nouvelles croustillantes sur les documents bureautiques 😉 .
Merci à tous ! Nous sommes vraiment heureux que tant de personnes aient trouvé le chemin vers des logiciels sécurisés et respectueux de la vie privée.
Richesse et diversité de nos partenaires et soutien à notre travail
Nous sommes heureux d’avoir pu vous retrouver sur cet événement situé à Paris. De plus, nous sommes très honorés de constater la vitalité de nos partenaires qui proposent des services sécurisés et respectueux des données personnelles !
The Open source Experience 2021 in Paris was wonderful. Of course we met a large number of people, but various of Collabora Online partners too! We love to tell you about them.
If you did not visit last week’s open source experience event in Paris, you should do so next year. It was great! And if you did, there is a good change that you saw various active Collabora Online partners! We love to show the good work of no less then five of them, who help their customers and end users in a number of different ways.
First, let us begin by giving credit where it is deserved.
Arawa won the award for best open source innovation strategy in Paris! They deserve it for helping many medium and large size organizations as well as public administrations with moving and consolidating on open source.
We were also very exited to see friends from Jeci and their nice booth. They are working hard on the next version of their Alfresco-Collabora Online integration.
Of a complete different magnitude, is the cooperation, project management and teams software offered by Algoo. Their lovely Tracim nicely integrates with Collabora Online.
Last but not least: we were really pleased to have been invited by Nextcloud to share a booth at the Open Source Experience in Paris. We shared an attractive booth with them, answering all your questions, exhibiting demos, and handing out some t-shirt, stickers & more.
The good people over at Nextcloud are working hard on finishing their next major release, including some wonderful office news 😉
Thanks everyone! We’re really glad that so many have found the way to your secure, privacy respecting software.
Grateful for the rich and diverse partners and support for our work
We are happy to have met many of you & others at the Paris event. Further we feel greatly honoured that our software helps so many businesses in doing great things for their customers and end users alike!
If you are looking for a partner, do check our partner page.
If you want to benefit from partnering with Collabora and from all the possibilities of Collabora Online,
do contact our sales team!
Optimizing the performance of Collabora Online is one of the central focal points within our current development work. Following improvements in the recent Collabora Online 6.4.10 release, the upcoming 21.11 release will exhibit more of the continuous improvements in this area. The improvements may be noticeably experienced through a variety of daily work done by means of the software. But how exactly does the implementation of massive performance improvements work? It can be compared to solid detective work. Follow us through this search for clues!
Performance improvement for multiple users – a detective story 🔎
In advance of the actual coding, working on performance improvements closely resembles detective work. Simulating multiple users working on the same document, is something that turned out to be feasible with the feature in LibreOffice purposed for displaying a document within different windows (Window > New Window). This was a feature that already existed in LibreOffice predecessor OpenOffice. It may be a rarely used feature on the desktop, but it does mirror the way of collaborative editing with Collabora Online. However, one must then find out how this code scales… The investigator in this story is Collabora developer Luboš Luňák. He was on to something big here, which led to significant performance improvements across various levels, ultimately benefiting all users of LibreOffice Technology. The technical details of his search and subsequent conclusions can be seen on Luboš’ blog.
While extensive work continues with its progress, a list of current performance improvements is also available on Luboš Luňák’s blog. The following video of the Collabora Online perf-test – a test routine we use to measure performance in Collabora Online – illustrates the performance improvements of the implementations already made. The test simulates the fast, simultaneous typing of six users in a document (the other five are not visible in the video because they are writing elsewhere in the document). The rigorous test setting, which goes far beyond what is required of the software in everyday use, is ideally suited to visualizing performance improvements. In the video, you can see the performance of Collabora Online before the latest optimizations in the upper excerpt, and the significantly better performance in current versions during (middle) and after optimizations have been implemented (bottom).
Collabora developer Luboš Luňák discussed the various performance improvements in Collabora Online during the Developer Day at COOL Days 2021, a conference hosted by Collabora and dedicated entirely to Collabora Online. His talk “Rendering wastage and performance wins” covered the profiling process, described existing performance issues and displayed a variety of improvements at different levels. Technically interested people can find his talk on YouTube. The corresponding slides are also available for download.
Please try out Collabora Online 21.11 – RC 1, and let us know of any workloads which you find have issues so that we may expand our internal testing & benchmarking to include them.
About Collabora Online
Collabora Online is the powerful LibreOffice-based online office that supports all major documents, spreadsheets and presentation file formats, which can all be easily integrated in many infrastructures and solutions. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file formatting 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 – built on LibreOffice Technology – enables Hosting and Cloud businesses to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offerings.
