Thank you to all who attended our COOL Days 2023 meet up in Cambridge on 28th & 29th March. We had a great time organising the event for our partners, the Collabora team and open source community. It was a great success!
If you didn’t manage to make it to Cambridge, check out our 90 second YouTube short which shows a quick overview of the fun we had.
COOL Days was based at Clare College, the second oldest of the 31 historic Cambridge Colleges. We started off our packed schedule full of lightning talks, partner workshops and team building with a meal at Millworks on the Monday evening (famous for it’s delicious Shawarma!)
The Technical Day
Is it possible to fit 45 lightning talks into one day? Yes!
We were live from Cambridge all day on Tuesday 28th March. It was wonderful to see so many presentations of all the work that’s been developing over the last 6 months by the Collabora Online team, community and partners all across Europe and beyond.
To download the slides from the Technical Talks, head to our github.
Partner Day
Wednesday 29th March was our Partner Day, full of workshops and discussions around our collaborative Partner Programme. It was a privilege to have Simon Phipps and Robert Riemann kick off the day with their insights into the importance of data protection in Europe and future of open source.
Throughout the rest of the day we had many open discussions with our Partners about how we can support them and work together even more successfully and talked about the development road map for 2023.
LibreOffice Technology Hackfest
On Wednesday 29th March we also held a Hackfest for those who are involved in the LibreOffice Technology community. Many hours were spent hacking in person, learning from one another and solving bugs with other members of the community.
Social Events
We made sure there were plenty of opportunities for team building including a treasure hunt around Cambridge, punting down the river Cam and of course, some delicious meals together. On the final evening we dined at Ridley Hall which for many, gave them a taster of what dining at Hogwarts might be like – minus the owls!
You may have seen some of our team live tweeting from the event – search #COOLDays and follow us on Twitter,Mastodon and Linkedin to see updates from events and conferences throughout the year.
We hope to see you at our next COOL Days event.
In the meantime, keep an eye out for where we’ll be next:
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, as well as an ideal option when working with Zotero research assistant.
Setting-up Zotero for Collabora Online
Setting up Zotero for Collabora Online in Nextcloud
At the time of writing, the Zotero integration is available to Nextcloud users with installed Richdocuments (v7.1.0 and up). All that is required to use this feature is Collabora Online, Nextcloud with Nextcloud Office app (richdocuments) installed and a valid Zotero API Key. Zotero users can create or edit their API keys at zotero.org/settings/keys and then simply copy it into the respective field inside the office settings (Administration Settings > Office) of their Nextcloud instance. All private properties related to the user remain private at all times, while public properties remain accessible to other users and are handled separately.
Inserting Citation and Choosing Citation Style
Choosing the citation style before inserting a first citation with Zotero in Collabora Online
Place the cursor on the position in your Writer document where you would like to highlight a citation. In the “Reference” menu or tab – depending on which user interface you are using – choose “Add Citation”. If this is the first time a citation is added to the document, a style prompt will show up, allowing you to choose from numerous citations styles – for example, Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Style, ISO-690, APA Style, Oxford Style Guide and many more. Setting the citation style needs only be done once, the chosen citation style will be stored inside the document. The work to be cited can be chosen from a pop-up dialog including your personal and shared libraries on Zotero. Large libraries can be filtered using the search bar.
Adding Citation from the Zotero library in Collabora Online (Tabbed UI)
Choosing a work to cite from the Zotero library in Collabora Online
Select footnotes or endnotes in the preferred style
Refreshing Citations and Style
Refreshing citations from the Zotero library in Collabora Online
It’s a common workflow for authors to add a series of incomplete records to their library as a first step, and then adding additional metadata. Another common request is to be able to change the citation style for a document. This is important when submitting works for different publications, but also if for instance a citation style gets updated to a newer edition. Collabora Online allows these updates to be made easily.
Pressing the button “Refresh Citations” (or selecting the respective item inside the menu of the Compact View UI) fetches the updates from your Zotero library. A message at the button of the document keeps the user informed about the progress of this process. Updating the Citation Style is also straightforward. The option “Citation Preference” opens the above-mentioned Citation Style dialog, allowing users to switch styles for the whole document at any time.
Creating a Bibliography and Inserting Notes
Adding an auto-generated bibliography inside Collabora Online
The Zotero integration allows users to make a clear distinction between notes and citations in Collabora Online. Inserting a note works similar to inserting a citation. Choosing this option from the UI will open the dialog and grant access to the notes of the user’s Zotero library. Notes are quite flexible items that can include HTML, formatting and emojis.
A bibliography of the works cited in the document can be generated automatically with a simple click. It appears at the position where the cursor is located. Collabora generates only the pure bibliography without additional text or placeholders, so the heading can be added according to your preferences (index, glossary, bibliography).
Try it in Collabora Online or CODE
The Zotero integration has been introduced to Collabora Online with the release of Collabora Online 22.05.10 in February 2023. You can test the feature in our free demo. Tech enthusiasts may also like to test it inside an installation of CODE, the free Collabora Online Development Edition, intended for home users and Developers who would like to help to test the latest features first. Find all the instructions here.
FOSDEM 2023 – The Talks and Slides from the Collabora Productivity Team
FOSDEM has returned to Brussels! It was great meeting again in person on Europe’s largest open-source conference for developers and tech-enthusiasts. We’d like to express our gratitude to the community, the organizing team and the many volunteers that made this happen. The Collabora team gave numerous talks, mainly on the LibreOffice Technology track. Missed a presentation? Would you like to dig deeper? Please find the links to the videos and to the downloads of the slides below. Would you like to discuss with us on some of the technical topics? Meet us in the forum or join the discussions on GitHub!
Michael Meeks
Collaboration and Content Management devroom
Collaborating with Collabora Online – How to re-use Collabora in your work or project
Collabora Online brings LibreOffice technology to the browser and integrates with a large number of different Open Source products. Come and hear from Michael Meeks how you can plug into new APIs we have for Grammar checking (with LanguageTool), Bibliography Management (with Zotero), and translation integration (with DeepL). Hear how an integration can work, and the new SDK samples to build on that we provide to make things easy for developers. Also catch a glimpse of the many improvements to the product that we’ve made to improve collaboration performance, interactivity, as well as core LibreOffice technology pieces around intereoperability and performance. Hear about our plans around off-line in the browser, and ask any questions you have. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Pranam Lashkari
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Feature Locking and Feature Restriction – Integrator’s Way to Unlock Potential
In this talk, Pedro Silva presents Pranam Lashkari’s work on feature locking and restrictions in Collabora Online. Using such methods, integrators can control which features to deliver to which user or group. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Miklos Vajna
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Writer Content Controls – What Happened in the Past Half Year
LibreOffice was capable of handling form filling in Writer for a while already. In the meantime, the competition introduced Structured Document Tags. Writer Content Controls are meant to perform a great handling of this third type of form filling. See Miklos Vajna‘s talk about what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice, hear what still needs doing and find out how you can help. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Sarper Akdemir
LibreOffice Technology devroom
An Interoperability Improvement in LibreOffice Impress Tables
Sarper Akdemir tells the story of an interoperability bug fixing adventure where the problem turned out to be deeper than it appeared at first glance, showcasing how there are multiple approaches to a single interoperability problem. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Attila Szűcs
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Footnotes in Multi-column Sections
In this talk, Attila Szűcs showcased the fix a seemingly small bug, that became much more complex than expected, because of the differences between writer’s, and word’s multi-column footnote capabilities. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Paris Oplopoios
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Supporting Old Proprietary Graphic Formats
Some proprietary graphic formats from the 90s like WMF are device dependent and hard to support. The standard is hard to navigate and implement. See how WMF bugs are debugged, fixed and tested. See details
Collabora Online Over Lockdown – How LibreOffice Technology in the Browser Got Better
Collabora Productivity’s CEO Michael Meeks showed how Collabora Online (COOL) has improved over the COVID-19 era, not only in core feature-function, but also in ease of access and deployment for everyone. See how we can deliver scalable, secure, on-premise editing of your documents with a simple, easy to deploy office for the free world. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Szymon Kłos
LibreOffice Technology devroom
LibreOfficeKit – Bridge Between Your Application and LibreOffice
Szymon Kłos gave a short introduction into integrating LibreOffice using LibreOfficeKit with external software. He described the most important code pieces and showed, where to look for information. He also demonstrated how to add new features, which API we provide, and what can be done with tiled rendering. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Pedro Pinto Silva
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Make Collabora Online Yours – Customize and Integrate it Everywhere
Collabora Online is quite flexible in the means that you can alter to your personal taste without the need to change other core components. Pedro Pinto Silva shows how to make Collabora Online yours. Discover all the shining new additions to the user interface and learn how to customize and integrate it everywhere. Also, have a look at Pedro Pinto’s recap blog post to learn more about his FOSDEM experience. See details
Watch the talk!
Download the slides!
Tor Lillqwist
LibreOffice Technology devroom
Collabora Online and WASM – Assembling Off-line Collabora Online with the Web
Tor Lillqvist‘s talk showcased a new approach to enabling browser deployment of rich office functionality – built on top of allotropia’s investment in enabling the core LibreOffice technology to compile to Web Assembly (WASM) – combined with the Collabora Online front-end. See how this can be used to provide a fall-back (non-collaborative) editing mode for when you lose network connectivity, and about the plans to re-synchronize documents on the return from such a tunnel. See details
Collabora Online 22.05 is our latest enterprise quality release. It’s suitable for large-scale deployment, and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates as well as interaction with product management, helping to direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organizations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control over them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host it on your own hardware or to integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner. For any questions or tailored solutions, do not hesitate to contact hello@collaboraoffice.com.
FOSDEM 2023 is back home in Brussels. Meet the Collabora Productivity team at Europe’s largest gathering of open-source developers and have a chat, some fries or a beer with us (also: make sure to grab some stickers!). As usual, our engineers will be giving talks about the latest developments in Collabora Online, Collabora Office and LibreOffice at the LibreOffice Technology devroom. Here’s the schedule!
Saturday, February 4th 2023
Collabora at the LibreOffice Technology devroom
Noel Grandin
16:10 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Turbocharging an Elephant – Making LibreOffice Faster
Most of the easy tasks are already done. This talk covers several improvements to LibreOffice, that required lots of preparational work and interesting challenges to introduce improvements into a massive (and messy) codebase.
Pranam Lashkari
16:20 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Feature Locking and Feature Restriction – Integrator’s Way to Unlock Potential
In the talk, Pranam Lashkari will explain and demonstrate how feature locking and restrictions work in Collabora Online. Using such methods, integrators can control which features to deliver to which user or group.
Sarper Akdemir
16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
An Interoperability Improvement in LibreOffice Impress Tables
Sarper Akdemir tells the story of an interoperability bug fixing adventure where the problem turned out to be deeper than it appeared at first glance, showcasing how there are multiple approaches to a single interoperability problem.
Miklos Vajna
16:40 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Writer Content Controls – What Happened in the Past Half Year
LibreOffice was capable of handling form filling in Writer for a while already. In the meantime, the competition introduced Structured Document Tags. Writer Content Controls are meant to perform a great handling of this third type of form filling. See Miklos Vajna‘s talk about what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice, hear what still needs doing and find out how you can help.
17:40 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
LibreOfficeKit – Bridge Between Your Application and LibreOffice
Szymon Klos gives a short introduction into integrating LibreOffice using LibreOfficeKit with external software. He will describe the most important code pieces and show, where to look for information. Furthermore, he’ll demonstrate how to add new features, which API we provide, and what can be done with tiled rendering.
Michael Meeks
17:50 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Collabora Online Over Lockdown – How LibreOffice Technology in the Browser Got Better
Come and hear how Collabora Online (COOL) has improved over the COVID-19 era, not only in core feature-function, but also in ease of access and deployment for everyone. See how we can deliver scalable, secure, on-premise editing of your documents with a simple, easy to deploy office for the free world.
Make Collabora Online Yours – Customize and Integrate it Everywhere
Collabora Online is quite flexible in the means that you can alter to your personal taste without the need to change other core components. Pedro Pinto Silva shows how to make Collabora Online yours. Discover all the shining new additions to the user interface and learn how to customize and integrate it everywhere.
Tor Lillqvist
18:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details
Collabora Online and WASM – Assembling Off-line Collabora Online with the Web
Come hear Tor Lillqvist‘s talk about a new approach to enabling browser deployment of rich office functionality – built on top of allotropia’s investment in enabling the core LibreOffice technology to compile to Web Assembly (WASM) – combined with the Collabora Online front-end. Hear about how this can be used to provide a fall-back (non-collaborative) editing mode for when you lose network connectivity for a while, and about the plans to re-synchronize documents on the return from such a tunnel.
Collabora Online 22.05 is our latest enterprise release. It’s suitable for large-scale deployment, and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates as well as interaction with product management, helping to direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organizations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control over them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host it on your own hardware or to integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner. For any questions or tailored solutions, do not hesitate to contact hello@collaboraoffice.com.
The Univention Summit has returned to its traditional date. Before the pandemic, the event in Bremen was an annual kick-off for showing how valuable open source is for digital sovereignty in companies, educational institutions and public administration. We are pleased to have been able to contribute to the success of the conference as Gold Sponsors yet again this year.
Open-source solutions as part of a digital-sovereign perspective for societies
As in previous years, the Univention Summit managed to bring together crucial players for advancing Digital Sovereignty at this year’s congress. Many of the crises that illustrated the need for more sovereign solutions for Europe in recent years, such as European dependencies on global trade chains – eg in the area of semiconductor shortages, or resource dependency on Russia – made clear by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, remained topics of the Summit. There were also references to current examples, such as the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. The summit succeeded in positioning open-source technology and the innovative power of medium-sized companies as a way out of one-sided digital dependencies. Imagery of the summit can be found in in Univention’s blog, the recordings of the keynotes of the congress are available on their YouTube channel.
“Sustainable Digitalization rocks!”, keynote by Peter Ganten (Univention)
In focus: The digital-sovereign workplace
One of the central topics that determined this year’s summit was the dPhoenix Suite. The digital-sovereign workplace, provided for many thousands of employees in public administration, makes it possible to work simply, web-based & digitally sovereign. The dPhoenix Suite combines various open-source modules from different manufacturers and is hosted on German data centres. The modules, from file sharing, email, video conferencing and office application are developed in Germany and Europe. Collabora Online is the online office application software within the dPhoenix Suite.
The Univention Summit 2023 in took place at the Metropol Theater in Bremen
The Collabora stand at the Univention Summit 2023
Workshop: Collaboration and document security with Collabora Online
The second day of the Univention Summit was dedicated to workshops. Many visitors made use of the opportunity to deepen the impressions gained in the talks and at the stands. On the second day of the congress, we from Collabora held a very well-attended workshop on “Collaboration and Document Security with Collabora Online” in the Haus der Wissenschaft. Here, people who have not yet had the opportunity to work with Collabora Online had the chance to learn about the advantages of our software, while other users took the opportunity to hear first-hand about recent and upcoming developments. The slides of the presentation (in German) are available for download here.
Click on the image to download the slides!
Thank you to all participants
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those involved. Many thanks to the Univention team for organising another great event. We were very happy to be part of a lively exchange with our numerous partners on site and to have many interesting conversations with visitors at our stand. We are excited to build a more transparent, more open and more reliable digital future together with you! See you again at the Univention Summit 2024!