Looking at what we have achieved together 🤝
At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team – in cooperation with our worldwide network of partners and the community. The year 2021 was again dominated by the global pandemic. While it had little impact on our work processes, it meant that personal encounters remained very rare.
At the same time, we launched the first COOL Days, a new event that brings together people interested in Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen major performance improvements and increased functionality this year. At the end of the year, we released CODE 21.11, which previews what our flagship enterprise product, due out in early 2022, will look like. Thank you, for your support this year. See what we have achieved together this year. 💜
🆕 Collabora Online includes new functionalities and better performance 💻
This year Collabora Online has undergone a number of important updates. In addition to interoperability and user experience, there was a strong focus on performance enhancements. Many ground-breaking new functionalities already celebrated their premiere in the 6.4 release branch. With the release of CODE 21.11, more new implementations from the desktop were added.
Collabora Online 6.4 adds ground-breaking features
- January, Version 6.4.3: Pivot tables, statistical tools and more features arrive in Collabora online.
- January, Version 6.4.4: It is now possible to add shadows to tables in Impress. ODF 1.3 support arrived.
- February, Version 6.4.6: Gutter margins improve production of printed documents and Fontwork adds graphical textart to all online modules.
- March, Version 6.4.7: Draw is now available online and VBA macros start being enabled.
- April, Version 6.4.8: Smart connectors are now available online.
- June, Version 6.4.9: Convenient CSV import from mobile devices introduced.
- August, Version 6.4.10: This version was a major update including many performance and interoperability improvements plus new features like Headers & Footers in presentations.
⚡️ Powerful new features arrive for Collabora Office on the desktop 🖥️
Collabora Office 21.06 brings enhanced productivity and smooth migration
June 2021 saw the major release of our desktop product Collabora Office. This release brought many UX improvements and smoother document interchange. Collabora Office 21.06 was focused on performance and making migration simpler for organizations. This release introduced a new numbering system, based on the year and month of its release, and many powerful features like a style inspector, better access for extensions and improved PPTX filters and many more.
Collabora Office 6.4 saw many updates and improvements
- April, version 6.4-33: Printed publications can now make use of Gutter Margins and PPTX import improvements for shaped bitmaps arrive
- May, version 6.4-39: Improvements on XML import have been implemented
🧰 CODE 21.11 provides insights into the upcoming enterprise version 📄
CODE 21.11 is the herald of our new enterprise version to be released next year. The current development edition introduces the full range of new features and performance enhancements for testing. Among other things, it contains the new native sidebar, improved interoperability and a number of new effects for objects such as glow, soft edges or blurry shadows. The numerous performance improvements include asynchronous save, JavaScipt acceleration, more efficient network traffic, and improved multi-user editing. Learn more details in our announcement.
🆕 Many new features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱
- January, version 6.4.3: Pivot tables, statistical tools and a more user-friendly UI for tablets is implemented
- September, version 6.4.11: Performance improvements implemented
- October, version 6.4.13: Many new features like Draw, CSV import, Fontwork text art, smart connectors and tablet specific UI improvements added
- December, version 6.4.14: More fixes included on Android, iOS and Chrome OS
🏠 Small scale work-from-home-solution and ARM64 support 👨💼
In March, together with our partners at Ubuntu and Nextcloud, we introduced a work-from-home solution for the Raspberry Pi including the easy-to-use Collabora Online built-in server. In April, we announced that CODE now also officially supports the ARM64 platform.
📰 Amazing news, interesting figures 📈
Over 250 partners worldwide
In 2021, our large network of amazing partners kept growing. We can now rely on over 200 partners from more than 50 countries. We help each other to promote open source, 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 become a partner yourself!
CollaboraOffice.com available in four new languages
We continued dedicating a lot of effort to make our website and the information about our products easily available to a larger set of people. This year we implemented translations in Simplified Chinese 
, Japanese 🇯🇵, Russian 🇷🇺 and Czech 🇨🇿 to the available options on collaboraoffice.com. Thanks a lot to the translators. Also, the community translating Collabora Online kept growing. Would you like to help to translate our software to your language? Join our translation team on Weblate!
Collabora’s Contributions to LibreOffice 7.1 and 7.2
Collabora is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice Technology. Our developers responsible for many commits to the LibreOffice core. Many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.1 and LibreOffice 7.2 like Smart Art improvements, blurry shadows for objects, gutter margins or the possibility to add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files have been implemented by Collaborans. Find more details of our 7.1 contributions in our blog.
Updated LibreOffice growth infographic 2021 📈
We updated the popular LibreOffice growth infographic. Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Over 210M active LibreOffice users, over 70M pulls from the CODE Docker image, 500K installs of the Collabora Office mobile apps, and more than 12K code commits from the community and the ecosystem to the LibreOffice code. Have a look at the numbers!
🎙️ Together at a distance – a year of online conferences 👏
The major events – foremost the large international conferences – had to take place online due to the global pandemic. Nevertheless, also new events emerged. We were part of the Open Source Day for Enterprises in Russia. For the first time, Collabora hosted the COOL Days, a virtual conference completely focused on Collabora Online. While most conferences took place online, there have also been a few opportunities to meet in person. For instance, in France, at the Open Source Experience and on at the it-sa fair in Nuremberg and some smaller German events like digital + souverän.
A fresh breeze on the calendar – COOL Days 2021
This year we hosted the COOL Days for the first time. A two-day online event that focused exclusively on topics related to Collabora Online. The first day, the Developer Day, focused on technical topics. The second day, the Business Day, dealt with questions of marketing and digital sovereignty. The schedule is available on our website, the videos from the Developer Day can be found in our playlist on YouTube.
FOSDEM 2021 went online
Europe’s largest open-source event had to take place as an online this year. However, this did not stop our team and the open-source community from presenting themselves and their latest developments. Collabora was present with a whole series of talk covering Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Find the videos of our FOSDEM 2021 talks and more slides available for download in our blog.
Collaborans contributing strongly to the LibreOffice conference
In contrast to last year’s joint conference, this year’s LibreOffice conference was hosted solely by The Document Foundation. The Collabora team presented 12 talks this year. All links to the videos and the slides for download can be found in our blog.
💪 A welcoming and vibrant COOL community 🤝
More than a year after moving the work on Collabora Online out of the TDF infrastructure and onto GitHub, we can say that it was a good decision. We have lowered the barriers to participation while increasing the transparency of the project. New, active members have been found, keeping in touch via the Telegram channel, and supporting the work on CODE and Collabora Online. Once a week, always on Thursdays, the community meets for a call.
Users can now easily file issues on GitHub, and the community answers questions from home users in the forum. The minutes of the community meetings can also be found there. Another great way to get involved is to help translate. At the same time, we are happy to be an important ecosystem partner of the LibreOffice community helping to advance LibreOffice Technology.
Showcasing our Consultancy work 💻
Our developers have a superb expertise in LibreOffice technology and implement new features and enhancements. This year, we did set up a page showcasing some of those implementations we realized on our client’s request – to the benefit of everyone. Find out more!
Presenting the benefits of Collabora Online for educational institutions 👩🎓
Scalable, reliable, privacy respecting and secure! Collabora Online is an ideal solution for modern learning environments. We have put together a web page with the many benefits of Collabora Online in educational institutions. Learn more!
The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️
Collabora Online SDK describes the main methods that allow you to interact with different Collabora Online components. Find installation guides, frequently asked questions, Post Message API and documentation on exiting integrations and on how to create new ones on our new SDK pages.
Google Summer of Code 2021 ☀️
This year, the Collabora team again provided mentors for LibreOffice projects within the Google Summer of Code. Among the topics mentored were interesting implementations such as the VCL graphics backend, the text style deck and revisions to the SVM format. Detailed information on these and other projects can be found in our GSoC 21 article.
News by Collabora directly into your inbox 📨
This year, we have updated our public newsletter. We made it visually more appealing and lowered the frequency of the mail outs. If you would like to receive regular updates like this one on the news on Collabora Online, Collabora Office and the COOL Days please sign up to our newsletter, that is mailed approximately 6 to 8 times per year.
Summary
It has been a very busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We enjoy seeing the Collabora Online Community grow and keep on advancing our mission to make open-source rock. We continued giving users privacy and businesses control over their data. We managed to achieve excellent results, and had a good time working on them – despite the challenging conditions that 2021 persisted. The first edition of the COOL Days was a real highlight for us. We have big plans for 2021, and hope there will be more possibilities to meet in person on conferences and on events. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to buy from us. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
