Category: Team blog

Meet us this weekend in Berlin, Germany!

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The Nextcloud Conference

Collabora will be attending the Nextcloud conference – an annual conference that brings the global Nextcloud Contributor Community together for a week of coding, design, discussion, talks & fun. The conference will be held from 23 to 30 of August 2018 in Berlin, Germany – at the Mathematics building of the Technical University of Berlin.

During the hackweek days participants will get together to code, write Nextcloud apps, improve design etc. On the weekend of August 25 and 26, will be different talks, keynotes, and workshops. Our own Tor Lillqvist will be there to talk about Collabora Online. His talk will be on August 25 at 11:32 AM and will present the work we have done on Collabora Online during the last year.

Check out the agenda for more details.

Nextcloud conference - group photo

The Enterprise Day

August 27, will be the Enterprise Day that takes place the day after the Nextcloud conference and features a track of technical sessions covering a wide range of enterprise use cases. Michael Meeks will have a talk about Collabora Online – if you want to know more about us feel free to attend his talk at 11:30 – Park Inn at Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Say hi to us!

Do you have any questions, feedback or you just want to hack with us? Let’s meet in Berlin at the Nextcloud conference – drop us an email at hello@collaboraoffice.com and we would be very happy to meet you there.

Improving PowerPoint Interoperability

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Product vs. Professional services

One of the great things about our product relationships with our customers and partners is that they allow us to invest in improving specified areas. We provide products that allow our customers to file individual bug fixes, and get an SLA (Service-level Agreement) to have an engineer start work on a problem; but while this focuses our work rapidly on exactly what a customer wants improving and delivering a fix to them fast – it can give a somewhat piece-meal result. Product customers, in contrast, allow us to tackle larger areas that they’ve experienced problems in.

In our recent release (Collabora Office 6.0 and also back-ported to Collabora Office 5.3, and in the forthcoming community LibreOffice 6.1 release) we have had a chance to invest in significantly improving our OpenXML PowerPoint (PPTX) interoperability.

What got better?

In the past, occasionally when we saved a file in PPTX format, Microsoft Office warned of problems with the document on load. We investigated why that was happening and it turned out that LibreOffice was missing PPTX export code for many important features – like the export of group shapes (all shapes were exported without grouping), export of embedded videos, and preservation of customXML on export. We implemented all of these.

Another huge missing hole was handling of PPTM files (PPTX with macros), including preservation of the VBA stream on export – now Collabora Office and LibreOffice 6.1 can do it too.

We also had a chance to fix a number of other important issues around animations (which are hard to see), like the implementation of animation type Command, Motion or Spin.

Finally, the most important were several document layout pieces. For example, when the original document looked like this:

After roundtrip (opening and saving) in LibreOffice 5.4.0 it turned into this one:

Luckily now, with the layout problems fixed, the original document roundtrips without issues:

Why not try it out?

In common with all other implementations trying to inter-operate with Microsoft, there are corner-cases where interoperability still needs improvement – but it is encouraging to see the significant reduction in easy annoyances here, and the results of improved rendering.

Download Trial version of Collabora Office 6.0!

Meet us in Spain and Japan!

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This weekend you can find us in two different conferences, where our team members will conduct a talk.

In Almeria, Spain…

From 11th to 13th May – we will be in Almeria, Spain to speak at National Congress on Software Development (SUPERSEC) conference. Michael Meeks will talk about securing your documents online. His talk with be on Saturday, May 12th at 4 pm.

LibreOffice and Online – securing your documents

Speaker: Michael Meeks
Time: 16:00
Day: Saturday, May 12

In Osaka, Japan…

Around the same time, we will be attending another event as well. On May 12th we will be in Osaka, Japan. One of our engineers, Tomaž Vajngerl, will explain the changes in LibreOffice 6.x from a developer point of view.

LibreOffice 6.x from a developer point of view

Speaker: Tomaž Vajngerl
Start: 13:10
Day: Saturday, May 12
End: 13:55

Say hi to us!

If you will be around and would like to have a chat with us drop us an email at hello@collaboraoffice.com and we would be happy to see you there.

Using Collabora Online to accelerate document conversion

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Nowadays we have different ways of converting our documents, using different tools that are available online. One option is JODConverter: (for Java OpenDocument Converter) a widely used tool that automates document conversions. Supported formats include OpenDocument, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Office formats (DOC/DOCX/RTF, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX) and many others. Usage can be as a Java library, a command line tool, or a web application. Traditionally the JODConverter uses a LibreOffice process for its conversion but newer versions of JODConverter can use Collabora Online directly.*

We built a dedicated page on our website explaining why you should consider switching to either the Collabora Online backend or more simply talk directly to Collabora Online itself.

What are the main benefits of using Collabora Online for document conversion?

  • Improved performance compared to startup-convert-shutdown approach;
  • The REST API is more reliable than starting LibreOffice in server mode and communicating via remote UNO;
  • More secure because the conversion happens in an isolated environment and this layered approach protects your infrastructure (from outer to inner layers):
    • It is easy to run it in a Virtual Machine / Docker Container;
    • Document data isolation into per-document chroots;
    • Seccomp-bpf: inside that chroot (almost) no system calls are allowed;
    • Extremely sparse filesystem inside the chroot: no shell etc.

For more details checkout our page that explains more about the benefits, performance, and how to try out JODConverter with its Collabora Online backend. If you have questions, feel free to send us an email.

Check it out!

Meet us this weekend in Hamburg!

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When…

On 7th to 8th April – this weekend- we will be in Hamburg, Germany to attend LibreOffice Hackfest. It’s again the time to meet other contributors to the project to “hack” all together. At the Hackfest will be EasyHacks prepared for anyone wanting to do their first code contributons to the project and we will be around to help every interested newcomer.

Will you join us?

If you will be around and would like to have a chat with us drop us an email and we would be happy to see you there.

Check out the wiki page for more details.

See you soon! 🙂