Collaboran talks at the LibreOffice Conference 2021

8 September 202122 September 2021 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

An online conference all about LibreOffice technology

Hosted by The Document Foundation, the LibreOffice Conference 2021 (LibOCon) will be an online event. The live-streaming of the talks and workshops will be taking place from September 23rd to September 25th. Collabora developers will give interesting talks on LibreOffice technology, Collabora Online and the ecosystem on all three days, providing profound insights around the latest features and developments. This article gives you an overview of our presentations. Meet us at LibOCon 2021 and just one week later at our COOLdays!

Day 1: Thursday, September 23rd 2021

Michael Meeks

13:00 – 13:30 – Room 1

Collabora Keynote

Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity and member of the LibreOffice Board, looks at the latest developments around LibreOffice from an organizational and ecosystem perspective.

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Noel Grandin

15:00 – 15:30 – Room 1

I feel the need… The need for speed…

Optimization is a lengthy process. But also an adventure that requires a bit of detective instinct and plenty of exploratory talent. Discover which adjustments are being made to make LibreOffice even faster and better performing.

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Marco Cecchetti

16:00 – 16:20 – Room 1

Some improvements for the SVG export filter

Marco Cecchetti reports on progress around the use of SVG in presentations and the improvements in performance and storage requirements on export.

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Tomaž Vajngerl

16:30 – 17:00 – Room 1

Improved document searching with LibreOffice

Collabora developer Miklos Vajna introduces the latest enhancements to LibreOffice and Collabora Online search that visualize hits across different documents.

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Mike Kaganski

17:00 – 17:30 – Room 1

Multi-column support in LibreOffice 7.2

The new feature, its relevance, obstacles and implementation status. Mike Kaganski shares his experience, how interesting was it to work on this.

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Day 2: Friday, September 24th 2021

Cor Nouws

12:00 – 12:30 – Room 1

A year of COOL …

Find out about the improvements that LibreOffice technology in the browser experienced. Hear about success stories and new features in Collabora Online!

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Michael Meeks

12:30 – 13:00 – Room 1

COOL performance

Recently, we have been focusing our Collobora Online development on improving the feel and slickness of document editing. Come and hear about the things that we’ve found and fixed, both in COOL and also in the LibreOffice core to improve the experience!

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Sarper Akdemir

13:00 – 13:05 – Room 2

PPTX footer export & import interoperability

Sarper Akdemir outlines the challenges around the export & import of Footers in PPTX and how they have been mastered.

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Miklos Vajna

13:30 – 13:50 – Room 1

Gutter margin in Writer page styles

LibreOffice was already capable of handling various margins in Writer page styles. A missing piece was the support for the gutter margins. Find out, how this was implemented!

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Tomaž Vajngerl

14:00 – 14:30 – Room 1

Built-in “Xray” like UNO object inspector

When developing macros and extensions in LibreOffice, it is very useful to have an object inspector. The Document Foundation put up a tender to create a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. It was awarded to Collabora, and we are now in the process of implementing it. Hear about the progress!

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Tomaž Vajngerl

15:30 – 16:00 – Room 1

PDF annotations support

The LibreOffice technology in Draw is key to PDF annotations, and the support of a recently added review-based workflow. Find out, how this has been implemented!

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Day 3: Saturday, September 25th 2021

Szymon Kłos

13:00 – 13:15 – Room 1

JSDialogs improvements over the past year

JSDialogs is a LibreOffice component used to share UI elements with Collabora Online. Hear about the most recent updates added.

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More interesting talks on LibreOffice technology at the COOLdays

We’re excited to announce the COOL Days 2021 – just one week after the LibOCon. The online conference will take place on September 30th and October 1st and feature a vast range of topics around Collabora Online’s technological and commercial development. The 30th of September – Development Day – is focused on developers to share their experiences. The 1st of October – Business Day – concentrates on commercial topics. Discover the COOL Days program.

Experience COOL Days

Thank you for your support in 2020!

23 December 202023 December 2020 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

It is a good tradition at the end of the year to reflect on what we have achieved as a team and together with our partners and the community, and remember with gratitude all the hard work that so many have put in.

Of course, this year was marked by the worldwide Corona pandemic. Early during the outbreak, we had published a statement on how far Covid-19 affected our work. Even though our structure – most of our team works remotely from the home office – meant that we were much less affected by difficulties than other companies, we too have friends, colleagues and relatives whose health were affected and also have kids we had to homeschool this year. Nevertheless, this has not affected our customer’s support, and there has been a significant up-tick in interest from people who want to collaborate on their documents without surrendering their data.

Despite all challenges, 2020 has been a very productive year at Collabora. We released important major releases for all our products – Collabora Online actually even saw two major releases, and Collabora Office arrived on Android and Chrome OS. Although conferences have only been possible online since March, we could present ourselves and our work quite well there. By moving to GitHub, a lot of fresh air and many dedicated people got in touch with Collabora Online.

Here is a summary of what we achieved together!

Collabora Online – two major releases, many improvements

The year 2020 saw two major releases of Collabora Online introducing handy new features and substantial UI and UX improvements.

Collabora Online 4.2 brings the feature rich Sidebar

In March, we introduced the Sidebar to Collabora Online 4.2. The versatile Sidebar hosts many of the most used features and provides a much improved user experience for the PC browser.

A version packed with new features

With Collabora Online 4.2 we also introduced an enhanced Colour picker with Conditional Formatting and the Function Wizard in Calc. We also added rich copy/paste, made working with images and tables much more easy and added the possibility to configure the Table of Contents. Find all the details in the Collabora 4.2 announcement.

Collabora Online table of contents — Rich table of contents in Writer

Exciting 4.2 updates throughout the year

Many updates followed throughout the year:

April: brought improved PDF handling and support of Asian date formats in Calc in version 4.2.2.
May: Support for dropdown lists in form fields in ODT & DOCX and other text file formats and the handling of tabstops directly on the ruler in version 4.2.3
June: Multiple slide selection on slide pane, handling of tab stops, improved word count on phones and many other features arrive in version 4.2.4

September: New options arrive in comment threads in Collabora Online 4.2.9
November: It is now possible to edit Chart titles from the Sidebar in Collabora Online 4.2.12

Find all the exciting details in the Collabora Online 4.2 release notes!

Collabora Online 4.2.9: New options in comment threads

Collabora Online 4.2.12: Edit Chart titles from the Sidebar

Collabora Online 6.4 introduces the NotebookBar

In November, we released Collabora Online 6.4. This version introduces the (optional) new NotebookBar with its well-organized tabs and the possibility to collapse it to save space.

Collapse the NotebookBar for more space

This version also included leap in version numbering. This aligned with our desktop version and now reflects more accurately the level of development, since much of the technology is shared by both products.

Collabora Online 6.4 added many new features like the possibility to freeze panes in Calc, many interoperability improvements like, transparent text (in both Impress and Writer) and gradient backgrounds and better SmartArt import in Impress. Find all the details in our announcement.

Collabora Office sees a new major release and powerful updates

In August 2020, we released Collabora Office 6.4. Our business-hardened and long term supported LibreOffice derivative brought a number of practical improvements to the workflow on desktops.

Security, encryption, PDF – new features on the Desktop

Naturally we had back-ported many of the new features to our supported Collabora Office 6.2 release as updates.

Padded Numbering was one of the results of this year’s hack week at Collabora and premiered in Collabora Office 6.2-9. Later this year it became part of Collabora Office 6.4 and LibreOffice.

Collabora Office 6.2-9: Padded numbering

In July, introducing the possibility to send encrypted PDF with Mail Merge, we added a privacy option to Collabora Office 6.2.-21. This also became available in Collabora Office 6.4 and LibreOffice.

Collabora Office 6.2-21: Send encrypted PDF with Mail Merge

Security features and PDF handling are focus topics. The option of adding visible digital signatures to PDF arrived in Collabora Office 6.4 in August.

Collabora implemented the Vulkan-capable rendering using the Skia library in LibreOffice 7.0. Download the slides from Luboš Luňák’s talk on this!

LibreOffice 7.0 Vulkan-capable rendering arrived

Collabora Office for iOS & Android

After the highly acclaimed release for iOS last year, we released Collabora Office for Android in February 2020.

Collabora Office for Android and iOS — Collabora Office brings rich editing experience to phones

This is the first time a fully function mobile office suite based on LibreOffice technology became available for Android. We have documented the long road to this point and the many supporters involved in the Collabora Office for Android and iOS credits.

An attractive layout & rich in features

Collabora Office for iOS and Android text document — Editing your text file

Collabora Office for iOS and Android presentation — Editing the content of a presentation

Thanks to the success of our mobile apps, we have expanded the LibreOffice user base by half a million mobile installations, as can be read in our annual LibreOffice infographic.

Adding more features to the mobile devices

Throughout the year we kept adding important new features to the mobile devices like tab stops & page set-up panels, improved word count, support for Asian fonts, and the possibility to open password-protected documents.

Collabora Office for Android & iOS 4.2.3: Page setup panel for text files on phones

Collabora Office for Android & iOS 4.2.4: Improved Word count on mobile devices

Collabora Office for Android & iOS 4.2.6: Writer document with different Asian fonts

Trying to open password protected files on Collabora Office for Android. — Trying to open password-protected files on Collabora Office for Android.

Version 6.4 – Another major release for mobile devices

The work on our mobile apps had its climax in the release of Collabora Office 6.4 for Android & iOS in November, which brought new features (e.g. gradient backgrounds, transparent text) from Collabora Online to mobile devices and introduced the NotebookBar to tablets.

Collabora Office for Android & iOS 6.4: The NotebookBar becomes available on tablets

Collabora Office for Android 6.4: The first Darkmode elements are beeing introduced

Collabora Office for Android & iOS are now available via the Play Store & App store. Additionally, we also offer an .apk file for download and made the repository available on F-Droid.

Get it on Google Play

Get it on App Store

Collabora Office ships on Chromebooks

After making Collabora Office available on Android, this summer, we completed our multiplatform strategy by making Collabora Office available for Chromebooks as well.

The Chrome OS version is also available via the Play Store and is now also available as version branch 6.4. Interested in the technical background? Check that out in this talk:

from Jan Holesovsky’s talk “Chrome OS as a new platform” at oSLO2020 available on YouTube

Download the slides of “Chrome OS as a new platform” by Jan Holesovsky at oSLO2020

CODE 6.4 and a growing vibrant community on GitHub

In September, we released the Collabora Online Development Edition 6.4. This showcased all the cool new features, interoperability improvements and the new NotebookBar that would two months later become available in the enterprise edition of Collabora Online 6.4.

Collapsed NotebookBar

Open NotebookBar

Use the hamburger menu to access more options

The release of CODE 6.4 also marked the beginning of our initiative to lower the barriers to join the project. A few weeks later we announced moving the source code of Online to GitHub making it easier for interested people to get involved, and tackling some of the intriguing community marketing problems we faced.

The community rocks

This year we invested a lot of time, effort and passion to make Collabora Online & CODE a more accessible and fun project to work on. We created a forum for users to find support, many easy hacks and assigned developer Muhammed Kara as a community mentor, helping people getting on board. Why are we doing all this? Read about it in our FAQ!

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online — Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 27, 2020 to December 04, 2020

Regular round-ups and calls

Part of our efforts to grow a vital, transparent and welcoming community are Muhammet’s regular Community Round-ups published on our blog, as well as weekly community calls on Jitsi. We really appreciate all the new contributions we saw coming in this year from so many people, checkout their names & credits in the round-ups.

An engaged team of translators

Want to get involved in another way than contributing code? Join the engaged community of translators over on hosted Weblate to make Collabora Online available in more languages. Thank you to the dedicated team of translators.

Getting involved

It’s never been easier to get in touch with the project. You can ask questions in the Collabora Online forum or chat with us on Freenode, Matrix or Telegram or just drop us a mail at hello@collaboraoffice.com. Or use #cool_dev on Twitter or Mastodon to talk with us about Collabora Online on social media.

Important announcements, interesting figures

Our partner network hits 200

2020 has been an excellent year to close new partnerships. We now have can rely on over 200 partners from more than 50 countries, we help each other to promote FLOSS, privacy & digital sovereign solutions and re-invest the proceeds into creating great new software. Find a Collabora partner in a special field or area… or why not become a partner yourself!

CollaboraOffice.com available in 8 languages

This year, we dedicated a lot of effort to make our website and information about our product available to even more people. At this point collaboraoffice.com is available in English , German , Spanish , French , Traditional Chinese , Italian , Portuguese and Turkish . And we have only just begun…

Updated LibreOffice growth infographic 2020

We also updated our popular LibreOffice growth infographic. With some impressive numbers… Over 200M active LibreOffice users, over 50M pulls from the CODE Docker image, 500K installs of the Collabora Office mobile apps, and over 16K code commits from the whole community to LibreOffice. Have a look at the numbers!

Collabora Online as default in Nextcloud 19

In June, Nextcloud Hub 19 started to ship Collabora Online as the default office application, featuring an easy installation with just a few clicks.

Collabora Online with ownCloud Infinite Scale

In October we announced that Collabora will be integrating Collabora Online with ownCloud Infinite Scale.

Events and conferences 2020 – virtually different

Events were dominated by the global pandemic for most of the year. Sadly there were few opportunities to meet in person.

FOSDEM 2020

In February, FOSDEM 2020 could take place as the last big meeting of the open-source community with many presentations by Collabora developers.

FOSDEM 2020: Download “LibreOffice turns 10 & what’s next” by Michaeal Meeks

FOSDEM 2020: Download “Integrate Collabora Online with web applications” by Andras Timar

Find all our FOSDEM talks in our playlist on YouTube and more slides for download in our blog.

oSLO 2020 – open SUSE & LibreOffice conference

The LibreOffice conference – this year co-organised by the open SUSE community – took place as an online event. Our team was involved with no less than 15 talks.

oSLO 2020: Download “Bringing The Notebookbar to Online” by Szymon Klos

oSLO 2020: Download “OOXML / PDF Digital Signing in Draw and elsewhere” by Miklos Vajna

oSLO 2020: Download “Implementing Vulkan-capable drawing using the Skia library” by Luboš Luňák

The talks are available in our playlist on YouTube and the complete set of slides can be found in our blog.

LibreOffice developement Workshop in Eskişehir

Collabora sponsored an impactful four-day LibreOffice development workshop during the Free Software Winter Camp at Anadolu University in Turkey. We wrote an article about the impressive results. Two participants of the workshop later went on to work GSoC projects for the LibreOffice project.

Google Summer of Code 2020

In addition to the Collabora Online community, our developers were very committed to this year’s Google Summer of Code. Read about the LibreOffice projects we mentored and the successful new implementations that resulted from these GSoC projects. Participants in the Google Summer of Code often become long-term contributors to the project.

Summary

In summary, it has been a busy year here at Collabora Productivity. This overview only sums up a small part of the great things we have been working on alongside the community. We have advanced our mission to make open-source rock; giving users privacy and businesses control over their data. We not only produced excellent results, but also had a good time working on these things – despite the challenging conditions that 2020 offered. If you’d like to get involved its easy to partner with us, buy from us, or get involved in the growing Collabora Online community. We have lots of plans in the pipeline for 2021 and hope there will be more possibilities to meet in person on conferences and on events. We would like to thank the whole team, particularly our great partners, and customers who make our work possible, and the community of developers and users who make it fun. We look forward to continuing the successful work with you in 2021! Have a very Happy Christmas & a peaceful New Year.

Thank You!

Collabora’s contributions to the LibreOffice Conference 2020

6 November 202011 November 2020 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Three full days dedicated to LibreOffice technology

The LibreOffice Conference 2020, this year also known as oSLO 2020, took place from 15 to 17 October 2020 as a joint online event with openSUSE. The number of participants at the online conference was roughly the same as at an on-site event. A total of over 320 participants had registered on the conference platform. Individual talks were attended by up to 150 people simultaneously. The LibreOffice community in Latin America had organized an additional track in Spanish and Portuguese. Our team contributed 16 talks (find the complete list here). Enjoy some recorded recordings, download the slides and feel free to ask further questions in our forum.

Collabora & the LibreOffice Ecosystem

Some much-acclaimed topics were the lectures by Michael Meeks, which highlighted the exciting and long-standing history of LibreOffice, and those that dealt with the relationship between profit-oriented companies and the voluntary community—and pointed out possible perspectives.

“Collabora & LibreOffice” by Michael Meeks

“Ecosystem, Branding & Investment” by Michael Meeks

Collabora Online

This year’s talks on Collabora Online had a strong focus on improving the user experience. Ashod Nakashian talked about the challenges of integrating Sidebars into Online, while Szymon Kłos explained the path to the NotebookBar, the new optional user interface. Tomaž Vajngerl showed the great new features for PDF files. Pedro Silva held a presentation on visual consistency, user experience, as well as possibilities for customization. He also showed how to join the project. Slides of his talk are also available in Portuguese (as part of the Latin-American Track). Muhammet Kara‘s presentation highlighted the new one-click option, that makes installing Collabora Online by home users much easier.

“Bringing The Notebookbar to Online” by Szymon Klos

“Improving visual consistency in Collabora Online” by Pedro Pinto Silva

“Making Online trivial to setup” by Muhammet Kara

LibreOffice & Collabora Office

These talks dealt with new functions added to LibreOffice by the Collabora team. This includes the extensive work with the SKIA graphics library, presented by Luboš Luňák, and the digital signing of files in PDF and OOXML, showcased by Miklos Vanja. Collabora Office is now also available on Chrome OS. Jan Holesovsky outlined what it took to port the Android app to Chromebooks.

“Implementing Vulkan-capable drawing using the Skia library” by Luboš Luňák

“OOXML / PDF Digital Signing in Draw and elsewhere” by Miklos Vajna

“Chrome OS as a new platform” by Jan Holesovsky

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

Our mobile apps are a lot of attention. Their huge success recently added 500K users to the LibreOffice user base. Szymon Kłos presented technical details how the LibreOffice Sidebar get re-used on phones. Tor Lillqvist focused, on the latest developments for Collabora Office on iOS, while Jan Holesovsky presented the history of online and mobile.

“Re-using the Sidebar on phones” by Szymon Kłos

“Mobile – Development on iOS” by Tor Lillqvist

“History of Online & Mobile” by Jan Holesovsky

Living on video?

Missed the conference? Would you like to watch or re-watch some talks? The sessions at the openSUSE & LibreOffice Conference have been recorded and are going to be published. We have a playlist collecting all the talks held by our developers. Find it here on YouTube. We are continuously adding the all published oSLO2020 talks there. In the meantime, please subscribe to our YouTube channel to not miss any updates from us.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Collabora developers mentor successful GSoC Projects

28 October 202028 October 2020 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Autumn is just around the corner. For many participants in the GSoC 2020, a busy and instructive summer full of hacking on open source projects came to an end a few weeks ago. Commits have been contributed and final reports have been written. This year experienced Collabora Productivity developers were again mentors for various projects of the Google Summer of Code for the LibreOffice project. Here are some examples of projects our team helped to succeed!

Analysing Writer documents with the “Style Inspector”

The “Style Inspector” is a great new tool. You can access it through a new icon (an eye combined with a pencil) in the Sidebar (also via “Sidebar Settings”). The Style Inspector displays in full detail (and hierarchical) all styles and also direct formatting applied to a cursor position in a Writer document. So you can analyse, identify problems and clean them up. Sometimes formatting in documents is messy and people mix styles with direct formatting. The Style Inspector allows you to see that.
The feature is available for testing in pre-released development versions of LibreOffice. Shivan Kumar Singh picked up the proposal from the LibreOffice Design Team. He was mentored by Collaborans TomažVajngerl and MikeKaganski with Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice Design Team. Take a look into Singh’s final report! It is an inspiring a guide on how to approach a big project like LibreOffice.

Improving the way to find and add extensions

There are many useful extensions to LibreOffice and users should be able to find them easily! Like in app stores like Gnome Software or the Play Store. That is basic idea behind “Tight Integrations” and the proposal from the LibreOffice design team. Yusuf Keten made this his GSOC project a success and added the possibility to search and sort the through extensions without having to leave LibreOffice. You start this new way to search with a clear yellow star with a download arrow, that is in the templates dialog, at the icons in the view options, or from the galleries pane in the side bar.
If you are curios about this handy extensions feature you can already test and find it in the latest LibreOffice pre-releases. Yusuf was mentored ba Collabora’s Muhammet Kara and Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice design team. Find all the details of Yusuf’s work in his final report.

“I learned a lot of things during the GSoC. Although GSoC is finished, I will continue to contribute to LibreOffice. I am very happy to be part of the LibreOffice community.” (Yusuf Keten)

Access the Tight Integrations manager through the icon in Gallery

Browse, search and sort through Templates, Galleries & Icons in the new extension dialog.

Changing the contour – shadows are becoming blurry

Did you know, that in LibreOffice the shadows are just a copy of the object? There are already a lot of settings to change their appearance, like its colour, its angle, the transparency and distance behind the object. Mentored by Collaboran’s TomažVajngerl and Miklos Vajna, Ahmad Ganzouri added another option. The “Blurry Shadows” make use of the already implemented BitmapFilterStackBlur and make the shape of the shadow look very realistic. Find the details around the development in Ahmad’s final report. We have seen the Blurry Shadow option in the master branch and expect it to be available to all users in Version 7.1 of LibreOffice. The option can be easily accessed via the “Area” dialog in “Objects & Shapes” or directly via the corresponding Sidebar module.

The blur setting can be defined Area dialog.

Searching for a mentor? Join us GitHub!

Google Summers of Code are an excellent opportunity to learn working in many open source projects. But where to find mentors during the rest of the year? We recently moved the code of Collabora Online to GitHub. You will find a growing community there, with easy hacks to get started. Community Mentor Muhammet Kara and the rest of our team of open source developers are there and willing to share their vast experience.

Join us on GitHub

Thank you for a splendid 2019

24 December 201929 September 2020 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Christmas and the end of the year are a time to reflect on the events of the past months. We have come a long way together and would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers, partners and community for your great support! 2019 has been a big year with important new releases for mobile devices. We brought Collabora Office to iOS and released a complete rewrite of our Android app. Collabora Office, Collabora Online and CODE have seen significant growth in features and improvements in usability.

Our products now bring effective collaboration with maximum control for organizations. A truly Open Source product that gives users ontrol over their own data and privacy, with excellent Microsoft interoperability, on every platform. The team at Collabora keeps growing, and more people than ever before are benefiting from our products and code contributions. Of course, this all would not have been possible without our talented staff, our great partners and the engaged community of volunteers around LibreOffice.

You all have made 2019 a fantastic year. Here is a short summary of what we achieved together!

Collabora Online improvements

Collabora Online 4.0.0

In January, we celebrated the major release Collabora Online 4.0.0 including a completely fresh look. It featured a better, simplified and more appealing UI. It also marked the point where we started to bring more of the full functionality for important features available online such as custom headers and footers or rich table of contents management for text documents.

Collabora Online 4.0 also featured integration with Vereign. We partnered with the Swiss open source company to provide authentic documents bearing the qualified electronic signature of your hardened self-sovereign identity.

Collabora Online 4.0.2 & 4.0.3

March brought two versions with notable fixes and updates. For example, when collaborating on a single document it really helps users to see the names being displayed over the caret of the people that are actively typing and moving through the document.

Collabora Online 4.0.4

This release in May added the feature to rename a file while editing.

Collabora Online 4.0.5

This release included packages for Debian 10.

Collabora Online 4.0.6

This version introduces new admin features and made integration easier via the reuse cookie option for WOPI implementations.

Collabora Online 4.0.7

In September, we added the opacity setting to configure tile Watermarks, as well as our regular set of interoperability improvements.

Collabora Online 4.0.8

In October version 4.0.8 provided different watermarks for each user for use with ownCloud’s ‘secure collaboration’ and Nextcloud’s ‘secure view‘.

Watermark view Collabora Online — Collabora Online can give each user it’s own watermark

Collabora Online 4.0.9

To improve security, and make them harder to ignore we added 45 degrees rotated user-watermarks for collaboration in these secure environments, as well as several fixes such as highlighting search results in read-only documents.

CODE 4.2.0 sets the bar for the next year

In December, we released a major refresh and upgrade of CODE, the Collabora Online Development Edition. CODE is perfect for home users that want to start to run their own online office suite and for tech-enthusiast. This CODE version is the base for the upcoming Collabora Online 4.2.0 release, due in early 2020. It has a fresh new look, with updated theming, and a refreshed toolbar, and we dare to say that it represents another huge step forward in features for online office productivity and collaboration!

One of the major improvements is the powerful sidebar. Changing properties of many elements and objects in office documents is now much while working in the browser, with close to the same feature richness that is available in Collabora Office on the desktop.

The sidebar and new dialogs support numerous advanced features.

Besides choosing a colour from a palette, you can also make use of the colour picker. The handling of links has also been improved.

Click to see some of the sidebar magic happen in Calc!

All the powerful functions of Conditional Formatting in Calc can now be controlled via the dialog.

Collabora Office 6.0.2 & 6.0.3 add new features

Collabora Office, our enterprise-grade, long term supported open-source office suite, sees major updates, new features and interoperability improvements every year. In January, Collabora Office 6.0.2 introduced the Unfloat Table button, making it easy to work with imported floating tables from Microsoft Word documents.

Another big ask from our customers was for redaction, so this year we created a built-in Redaction tool, and went on to extend that with fast and automatic marking of text.

Another really useful feature, particularly for web integration of spreadsheets is the Page per sheet PDF export we implemented for Calc, allowing users to see apparently non-paginated spreadsheet previews.

Collabora Office 6.2: The best in features, interoperability and support in open source

And right before the end of the year, we made another huge step. Not only concerning the release points, but also in features and interoperability. Version 6.2 came just in time for Christmas.

This includes many features from ourselves and the community, such as the enhanced printing dialog, and improved Help which make working with Collabora Office even more efficient and user-friendly.

Collabora Office on Apple iOS

In 2019 we delivered our first version for Apple’s tablets. In a huge joint effort together with Adfinis SyGroup, started in 2018, we brought Collabora Office to iOS (beta). It is now available through Apple’s app store for free.

Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.

Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS

Composing texts in Collabora Office iOS.

Making the app easier to use: The sidebar contains contextual features and makes good use of the wide screen of the iPad.

Collabora Office on Android

Shortly after the release of Collabora Office on iOS, we released a complete re-write of Collabora Office on Android. This is now based on the same technology as Collabora Online. More than just a viewer it allows the editing of documents with a new phone-friendly UI. The beta version is available from the Google Play Store.

Text file with spreadsheet embedded – Collabora Office for Android

Image handling in text document – Collabora Office for Android

Community & LibreOffice

We love to work alongside with, and contribute to the LibreOffice community. We were pleased to sponsor the LibreOffice Conference 2019 that took place in Almería, Spain.

One day before the conference we organized a special team building day for our staff, partners and customers and went snorkelling in Cabo de Gata. Big fun!

Conference Slides

2019 has also been a year full of traveling, conferences, … and of course slides. Here are just a few examples of talks held by Michael Meeks, Andras Timar and Jan Holešovský held this year. They and many others are available for download.

LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara

As part of our community building investment we sponsored a LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara. Here, Collabora Productivity Developer Muhammet Kara is teaching enthusiastic students of the Hacettepe University about C++ and developing LibreOffice. Pranam Lashkari has also been training students in India:

Summary

In summary, it has been a busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We can only present a small part of what we got up to with a few pictures and links in this overview. We have advanced our mission to make Open Source rock; giving users privacy and businesses control over their data, with our open products. Not only has our work produced excellent results, but we have also had a lot of fun. If you’d like to get involved its easy to partner with us, buy from us, or to get involved in the awesome LibreOffice community. We are full of energy and have lots of new ideas and plans in the pipeline for 2020. We would like to thank the whole team, particularly our great partners, and customers who make our work possible, and the community who make it fun, and we look forward to continuing the successful work with you in 2020!