Cambridge, United Kingdom – Bangalore, India – 01 November 2022
Collabora, the developers behind Collabora Online, and Exzatech Consulting, an IT and software solution provider focusing on security and enhanced business performance, are happy to announce a partnership integrating Collabora Online and Exzatech’s ‘Ndryve’ collaborative workspace.
“We are pleased to be Partnering with Exzatech and increasing our offering in Asia.” said Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity. “We love to work with Partners who place value in providing businesses with data privacy and have a great vision for their technology.”
Collabora Online now available in Ndryve
Exzatech provides Ndryve, an enterprise-ready, remote-friendly, “Content Collaboration Workspace” with a focus on data protection and security. Providing a range of benefits for all types of businesses including Government and Healthcare, Ndryve also hosts unique features for research and academic institutions.
Ndryve offers traditional on-premises, hybrid managed or fully cloud-hosted content collaboration workspaces. Their technology combines the ease of consumer-grade solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive, with the security, privacy and control of individual business’ needs.
Collabora Online is a powerful online office suite that supports all major document, spreadsheet and presentation file formats which can be easily integrated in many infrastructures and solutions. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file format 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 enables Hosting and Cloud businesses to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offerings.
“We are happy to now be offering Collabora Online as an integration in Ndryve, giving our customers the ability to integrate a full-featured, flexible, collaborative workspace across desktop and mobile.” says Anantha Raghava, Chief Executive Officer of Exzatech Consulting.
About Exzatech Consulting
Exzatech combines flexibility and creativity to provide strategic guidance and innovative solutions to their clients. Their vendor-agnostic approach gives them the ability to provide the most suitable analysis, advice, and solutions for each business. Over the years, they have deployed adaptable and innovative solutions for a number of leading BFSI, government, and enterprise clients that have improved operations, secured networks, saved costs, and enhanced business performance.
“As individuals, we are just like anyone else. But as a team, we are a powerhouse of knowledge, skills, and ideas. With decades’ worth of business and technology experience under our wings, we have built a formidable presence as a much sought after IT and software solution provider in India and abroad.” says Exzatech.
Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online, an online office suite based on LibreOffice Technology. Collabora provides a wide range of products, as well as consulting services for enterprises and governments. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support.
Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS and Android. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.
Cambridge, October 26, 2022. Collabora Productivity announces the availability of Collabora Online in the OpenPOWER architecture. Accessing this architecture makes our collaborative online office available on another group of powerful data centres and is the result of the young partnership with independent IT service provider 21unity, based in Dieburg, Germany.
Collabora Online Available on OpenPOWER
Starting with the release of the enterprise version 22.05.6, Collabora Online now supports the ppc64le architecture. The abbreviation describes the little-endian architecture provided by the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is based on the Power ISA instruction set. Power ISA is a successor to the PowerPC ISA developed by IBM for the microprocessor architecture of the corresponding name. The architecture is super-scalable and belongs to the family of Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC).
“We are pleased to bring our product to the Power platform”, says Michael Meeks, General Manager, Collabora Productivity. “We love to work with like-minded partners who build their business around open technologies.”
Benefits of the OpenPOWER Architecture
Unlocking the OpenPOWER architecture is a consistent step in our strategy to make Collabora Online available on all modern architectures and platforms while bearing the best possible performance in mind. It enables us to deliver our collaborative online office on an additional family of servers and data centres. The OpenPOWER architecture combines performance with high reliability. The openness of the technology is the key to the recent innovations in performance and energy efficiency. For the ppc64le platform, Collabora currently provides Ubuntu 20.04 packages and Docker images to customers and Partners.
21unity and Collabora Productivity Forge a Partnership
The availability of Collabora Online on the OpenPOWER architecture is the result of the fruitful partnership between the Dieburg-based IT service provider 21unity and Collabora Productivity, and was facilitated by the openness of the technology used. The OpenPower Foundation follows an open collaboration model for its technology, in which participating companies share technological innovations with each other – comparable to Collabora’s open-source software development. Collabora Online is based on LibreOffice technology – new features and enhancements that our developers create for our desktop suite are incorporated into the LibreOffice core alongside Collabora Online. 21unity offers the digitally sovereign online collaboration solution 21unity CLOUD as a new product on the OpenPOWER architecture. The offering consists of Nextcloud Enterprise for sharing files, writing email, and conducting chats and video conferences, and includes Collabora Online as a feature-rich, professional online office with outstanding interoperability.
“We are very pleased to be offering Collabora Online in our 21unity Cloud running on OpenPOWER”, says Yogi M. Schneider, CTO/CDO at 21unity. “It’s great to be able to offer the excellent features and interoperability to a wider user base.”
21unity operates the 21unity CLOUD from its own data centre with enterprise-class POWERServers in Dieburg, Germany.
About 21unity
21unity, based in Dieburg, specializes in customized IT solutions for companies. They are a cloud service provider and offer an “out-of-the-box” Nextcloud Enterprise with 21unity Collaboration Cloud and also created their own ERP system, which give the customers a full-fledged digital office experience. Their mission is to create easy-to-use, browser-based solutions for uncomplicated digital collaboration. In the area of system integration, they consider themselves not just a solution finder or developer, but an accelerator and trusted partner for digital transformation. The cloud offering provides a comprehensive collaboration office with the security of a German server location. The link with 21pro – a proprietary ERP – professionalizes the workflow in the process. Learn more at 21unitycloud.de
About Collabora Productivity
Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online, an online office suite based on LibreOffice Technology. Collabora provides a wide range of products, as well as consulting services for enterprises and governments. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.
Writing grammatically correct and stylistically beautiful texts in the browser has now become much more convenient. LanguageTool, known to desktop users of Collabora Office and LibreOffice as a powerful grammar checker extension, is now also available for Collabora Online. In this article you can find out how to use it for your online documents.
About LanguageTool
LanguageTool’s mission is to unleash the professional writing skills in every user. It is an open-source project based on AI-technology that analyses the style, tonality, and typography of text and instantly generates context-aware suggestions. The software supports spell- and grammar checking for 30 languages and is constantly being enhanced by an international team of linguistic professionals and machine learning experts. Besides the plug-ins for desktop office suits, it offers add-ons for all major browsers.
Many users of LanguageTool’s browser add-ons may already be familiar with how LanguageTool works. Once installed, it automatically highlights errors in composed online forms and text fields in different colours. However, the documents we edit in Collabora Online are not text in the true sense of the word, as the document never leaves its location on the server. Users only see image renderings of the document during editing. For this reason, a server-side setting must be made to activate LanguageTool. For more information, please consult the technical documentation on LanguageTool. Additionally, a paid premium account with LanguageTool offers better checking results and a larger selection of alternative formulations.
Using LanguageTool in Collabora Online
Through the integration of LanguageTool, different types of errors in text are now highlighted in different colours within Collabora Online. Spelling errors continue being indicated by a red underlining. Grammatical errors are indicated by an orange underline, while stylistic errors are underlined in blue. If you mark the highlighted error, you can display alternative formulations by right-clicking and selecting them through the context menu. LanguageTool’s grammar correction works in all Collabora Online modules, i.e., not only in text documents but also in spreadsheets, presentations, or Draw designs.
Step-by-step Procedure
Write your text in Collabora Online
LanguageTool automatically detects and underlines mistakes in your text
Right-click the underlined segment to open the context menu with LanguageTool suggestions
Choose the prefered suggestion from the context menu
Examples of Grammar- and Style Checking with LanguageTool
Here are just a few examples of style and grammar mistakes that LanguageTool can detect.
(Presumably) Incorrect dates and weekday (Weekday and date mismatch, dates in the future)
Successive beginning of sentences with the same word
Stylistic redundancies (e.g., 6 PM in the afternoon)
Unpaired Symbol message from LanguageTool in Collabora OnlineSuccessive beginning of sentences with the same word detected by Language Tool in Collabora Online
As mentioned above, to make use of this feature, you have to enable this inside Collabora Online’s configuration file. Depending on whether you are using a free or a premium account, both the quality and amount of the suggestions may vary. We would like to express our gratitude to Nicolas Christener and his wonderful team at Adfinis for making this great feature a reality.
The new Collabora Office 22.05 brings improved performance and better interoperability
Cambridge, May 30th, 2022 – Today we are pleased to announce the availability of the new major release of Collabora Office. With improved interoperability, better performance, and new features we can enhance the productivity of all users. Collabora Office, for macOS, Windows and Linux, is an enterprise version of the world’s most popular open-source office productivity suite LibreOffice. It is the foundation for new versions of our online collaboration suite Collabora Online, and also will power our apps for iOS, Android and Chrome OS.
The whole suite offers businesses and professionals the best features, interoperability, Long-Term Support (LTS), and bespoke development services in open source, while respecting users privacy and corporate data security. For news and improvements in the consecutive updates, check this release notes page.
“Jumbo Spreadsheets” with 16k columns in Calc
Collabora Office 22.05 increases the maximum number of columns available in Calc to 16384
A frequently requested feature is that Calc in Collabora Office now supports up to 16384 columns in spreadsheets. This is a sixteenfold increase in the maximum number of columns compared to previous versions. This capability was previously available as an experimental feature, but with the current fine-tuning, it is now available to all users by default. Previously, Calc would display an error message on opening large sheets and crop the data in the extra columns. Combined with up to one million rows per spreadsheet, Calc can now handle enormous amounts of data on the right hardware. Previous performance improvements in Calc paved the way for this feature which also increases the interoperability with Excel spreadsheets from Microsoft. If you are interested in the technical details, we recommend you take a look at Luboš Luňák’s developer blog. This work was funded by DEVxDAO as part of their mission to support open-source and transparent research and development of emerging technologies and frameworks.
Sparklines are now available in Calc
Sparklines for Calc have arrived in Collabora Office 22.05
Sparklines are mini-charts found in Microsoft’s XLSX format. The support for them premieres with the release of Collabora Office 22.05. Sparklines are always defined for one cell, but different ones can be grouped together. There are three different ways of displaying Sparklines. They can be displayed as lines, bar charts or stacked as win-loss charts. The Sparklines feature can be accessed through the right-click dialog. The unique data for a Sparkline is defined in the data range.
All three types of Sparklines displayed horizontally and vertically
Word-style border fixes available for pages, tables and paragraphs in Writer
Improved rendering of Word-style borders for pages, tables & paragraphs in Collabora Office 22.05 Writer
In Collabora Office 22.05 we have been looking at Writer and how it can better render Word-style borders around pages, tables and paragraphs. Word users expect to be able to import their documents to Writer and have a rendering that is true to the original. A series of fixes to the way page, table, and paragraph borders of OOXML documents are imported into and painted in Writer meets this desire. This is done conditionally, so existing ODF documents are left unchanged. As a result of this work, Writer now has a set of improvements to better render Word-style borders around pages, tables and paragraphs. Thank you to Docmosis and TUBITAK for making this work by Collabora possible. Find out more about the technical background in Miklos Vajna’s development blog.
Linked paragraph and character styles arrive in Writer
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With the release of Collabora Office 22.05 Writer has now the ability to handle linked character styles and paragraph styles from Word documents. This improves interoperability and may improve the style previews and the UI of future releases. Earlier, links were lost on round-trips between Writer and Word which led to unwanted displays inside the style pickers. This work was made possible thanks to Docmosis. Find more details in the developer blog.
Adding links to shapes in Writer
It is now possible to add links to shapes in Writer
The latest version of Collabora Office introduces the ability to add hyperlinks to shapes in Writer. This option was previously only available in spreadsheets and presentations, but not in text documents. At the same time, links in shapes were previously also lost when importing Word documents, so this feature also improves interoperability. To make use of this feature, simply select a shape and choose the hyperlink symbol from the GUI. Editing of exiting hyperlinks is also possible through the right-click dialog. Many thanks to our ecosystem partner allotropia for implementing this.
Improved shadows for tables in presentations
The interoperability of transparent shadows in tables saw further improvements in Collabora Office 22.05
The way Impress handles shadows in tables saw additional refinements. Now it correctly renders shadows for table shapes, even if the shadow itself or the fill of the table cells have transparency. This is another enhancement of the compatibility with Microsoft’s PowerPoint with regard to the support of transparency in table cell fills and table shadows. We’d like to thank our partner SUSE for making this improvement possible, find more details in Miklos Vajna’s developer blog.
New PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes available in Impress
New PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes available in Writer
A few new PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes have been added to the Paper Format options inside the Slide Properties. The “Widescreen” option is currently used in PowerPoint, while the different “On-screen Show” options are used in previous versions of PowerPoint and Google Slides. Any exported file created with these sizes will be treated as a preset size (as opposed to a user size). The same applies on import. Thank you to Jun Nogate for the work on this!
Many performance improvements across all modules
In addition to improving interoperability, one of the main areas of activity for Collabora engineers is the continued improvement of performance. In the new main version of Collabora Office, significant performance improvements can be found in all modules, which were achieved by streamlining the code. For example:
The export speed of complex PDF documents has increased in Writer
The load speed of large RTL documents was improved in Writer
The rendering speed of complex Writer document has increased
Calculation performance improvements for Calc
Improved opening speed of XLSM & XLSX files
Improved inserting speed of large Charts in Calc
Improved speed of lookup functions in Calc
Improved speed for auto-filtering in Calc
Improved use of threads for calculations in Calc
Improvements on shape rendering in Impress & Draw
About Collabora Office
Collabora Office is the LibreOffice Technology-based suite for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 22.05 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 22.05. This, our annual release, contains much work that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.3 and then LibreOffice 7.4, for a deep dive on detail and credits, please do peruse these. It’s easy to migrate to Collabora Office 22.05. You can try Collabora Office 22.05 yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today!
Collabora has invested significantly in bringing many new features and functionality to this latest release, and accounts for a significant volume of contributions. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues who helped to contribute to this and the upstream LibreOffice Technology. Find the details in either the release notes above or the LibreOffice community credits. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work! LibreOffice is a friendly community offering many ways to get involved. Alternately, if you are interested in joining the Collabora Online community, you will find several easy ways to started inside our community hub – we look forward to
welcoming you.
