Tag: Collabora Office

Rich Table of Contents feature in Collabora Online

Cor Nouws Leave a comment

Try this new rich feature in the Collabora Online snapshot!

Why not have full control over the Table of Contents while working online?! How hyperlinks are used, formatting is done, and settings as columns and background..
Well, that is what we bring to you in Collabora Online now. It gives you the same rich scale of features that are known from the LibreOffice desktop, or of course our enterprise supported Collabora Office.

This is how it looks in our latest snapshot.

You’ll notice that the context menu of the index, allows you to update or delete it. To get access to the dialog with all the settings, use Insert > Table of Contents and Index >… while the index has the focus.

Start using and testing the new features

You can get a snapshot of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now!
There’s a flow of new features to be expected. We’ll blog about it regularly, so stay tuned! And of course we love you to use and test it and let us know what you find.

Get & Test Snapshot

For more information

Follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter or send us an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com

Automatic Redaction – now more efficient redaction in Collabora Office

Cor Nouws 3 Comments

 

The new Automatic Redaction makes redacting even more efficient

The Redaction tool has been extended, for fast and automatic marking of text. This tool is designed you to hide words and other portions of a document that are sensitive, classified or private, so that you can safely share an image-pdf of the file with others. Its details are explained in a previous article.

And now, the new feature Automatic Redaction allows you to add words and patterns that then are found in the document and marked for redaction. It extends on features such as cooperating, preview, choice in style of hiding information. This makes redacting documents in Collabora Office really efficient. It works faster and helps considerably doing the job correct. Here is how it works.

How to use the Automatic Redaction?

  • The next image from Writer shows how to start from Tools > Auto-Redact.

  • The dialog has a list for redaction targets. It is simple to add items.

  • The selection list Type also allows to use regular expressions or choose from pre-defined types.


  • Also interesting is the possibility to save the list of targets to a json-file, and load them likewise.

  • Then with OK the file is converted to image with marked areas, and opened in Draw for further redaction, reviewing and final export as PDF.

As said, a previous article explains all basic features.

Want to start using the Redaction tool?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now!

Try Unstable Snapshot

Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too.

 

For more information:

Follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter or send us an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com

The built-in Redaction tool in Collabora Office is here!

Eloy Crespo 10 Comments

What is Redaction and why it is useful?

Redaction tool is a software feature which allows users to redact documents and to block out words or portions of a document according to rules for authorized use or viewing.

The aim of this tool is to protect sensitive information and help enterprises and other groups to comply with regulations, such as GDPR, for a given industry or a type of document.

Note: you might be interested in the later added feature Automatic Redaction too.

Redaction tool helps to make certain kinds of tedious data entry or alteration easier, and to provide more comprehensive and consistent methods for safeguarding sensitive data in documents. This has become very important in many types of industries, such as Pharmaceutical / Medical, Health or Finance / Banking / Insurance/ Legal.

Now, with Collabora Office, you have the opportunity to use this practical tool with lots of improvements.

How this works on paper ?

Amazingly, even in 2019 people are still printing their electronic documents. Manually redacting them with a black pen, photocopying them, and then re-redacting the photocopies in the same places with a pen (and sometimes re-photocopying) – to ensure that no trace of the original is present. It seems amazing to sit next to a powerful computer that can easily do this while manually using a pen, paper and photocopier to achieve the result. Surely there must be a better way:

How can I start using built-in Redaction?

    1. Open a document in Collabora Office.
    2. Click Tools – Redact from the main menu, and wait while your document is being prepared for redaction.

    1. Notice your document is now loaded in an adapted ‘Draw’ view.
    2. Do the redaction by using the “Rectangle Redaction”, and the “Freeform Redaction” tools on the “Redaction Toolbar”

    1. Notice the redaction rectangles are semi-transparent in this version to help you while you edit and position them
    2. Save & share the in-redaction copies of the document with peers either in the modifiable (odg) or the verbatim (pdf) format at your option.

      • For saving a modifiable copy, you may simply click File – Save from the main menu.
      • The Direct Export to PDF button allows the user to take an in-redaction copy of the document in PDF to share as a verbatim copy for review.
    3. Once you are ready to finalize the redaction, click the desired option on the “Redacted Export” tool on the Redaction toolbar. Then load up your document in your
      favorite PDF viewer to check

Can I be sure my data is really gone ?

It is important to be confident in this. There are a large number of obvious problems with redacted documents. It is important to ensure that data is not left in the PDF underneath.
While there are many cleverer ways of doing the redaction, and there is some sacrifice in copy/paste-ability for non-redacted text – we chose to export PDFs that contain simple, flat images on each page. If you can’t see the pixels you don’t want – the data is simply not there. So yes, you can be really confident that your data is not present.

Which are the most important improvements?

This development work is ongoing, and has been provided to our customers as we go along.
Recent improvements include:

  • Handle other page sizes than A4
  • Direct PDF export in the Redaction toolbar
  • Make white rectangles the default to save toner
  • Protect page position during redaction
  • Enable redaction for Impress

Want to start using the Redaction tool?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now!

Try Unstable Snapshot

Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too.

 

For more information:

Follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter or send us an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com

Collabora Online 4.0 released

Michael Meeks Leave a comment

Cambridge, United Kingdom, February 14, 2019 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, is excited to announce a new, major release of our enterprise product Collabora Online 4.0. This release includes a fresh look, mobile improvements, improved interoperability, new dialogs and functionality as well as a raft of bug fixes and polish.

At the same time as our release we are updating the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) for home users, and to make it easy for everyone to try this out and get involved with integrating it into their systems. For more information please visit CODE’s page.

What has changed?

This release includes a fresh look – with improved toolbar colors and layout, mobile improvements – with support for Retina and HiDPI screens along with easier shape editing, as well as improved interoperability provided by upgrading the underlying document rendering core to Collabora Office 6.0. In addition, we introduce support for Vereign’s blockchain-powered platform which provides Collabora clients with an authentic identity management solution as well as bringing more of the rich dialogs of our core engine to users.

Screenshot of Collabora 4.0 on a computer

Refreshed Toolbar icons and layout

Toolbars have been refreshed to integrate the Colibre icon theme (thanks to Andreas Kainz) and lighter coloring, which significantly improves the look of 4.0. Compare before and after.

Collabora Online 4.0 Toolbar comparison from Writer

 

Collabora 4.0 bubble toolbar

In addition, a new icon to hide the menu bar is now present. It further simplifies the UI.

More space Add document type icon More formatting options

Screenshot of Collabora 4.0 bubble renaming document

The document file name – which you can click-to-rename – has been tucked into the menu more neatly. Further, a ‘click-able’ modification time – which when clicked launches the revision history – has been added.

While Collabora Online can be used as a software component integrated into a variety of products, these improvements to the visual design have been developed in close partnership with Nextcloud.

Integrating with Vereign

Vereign is a Swiss open source company building a blockchain based self-sovereign identity and personal data store. It can be hardened to Swiss banking standards. They are currently running a beta program to add authentic communication to e-mail, starting with Gmail and Roundcube. Collabora has partnered with Vereign to also provide authentic documents bearing the qualified electronic signature of your hardened self-sovereign identity.

logo of vereign company

The document_signing_url configuration key in loolwsd.xml will be pre-set to app.vereign.com for future CODE releases, as/when the API is stable. However Collabora Office users will need to enable this integration explicitly if they want it. If you are already signed up with the Vereign beta program, to send authentic email with your Gmail account, your self-sovereign identity and its passports will be immediately usable for signing documents in CODE 4.0.

Use the File → Sign document menu option to activate the ‘Vereign Toolbar’ to log into this service.

 

Screenshot of Collabora Online 4.0: signing documents digitally

For the users who are accustomed to using the Vereign app, we have created a QR code dialogue so as to speed up their log-in process.

 

Screenshot of a dialog window requesting the user to scan a qrcode with vereign app

And after using the identity to sign the document with a qualified electronic signature according to the EU and the Swiss laws, you should see:

Screenshot of Collabora Online 4.0: signing documents digitally with a logged session on Vereign app

Vereign also supports storing – and later publishing – copies of signed documents to provide you with an independent, user owned archive of your interactions. This archive is blockchain secured, as is the audit trail of all your identity interactions.

Vereign is currently gathering interested parties for Proof of Concept (PoC) deployments next year and partners with potential use cases are encouraged to contact Vereign directly.

Improved shape editing

To make shape editing much more pleasant, and more helpful for touch users we have enlarged the size of the selection handles and made them circular. We have also added a more convenient and familiar rotation control to avoid needing to use the shape dialogue to rotate objects.

screen of the new rotation handle added to the transformation feature

We have also added a more convenient and familiar rotation control to avoid needing to use the shape dialogue to rotate objects.
Rotation control added to shape dialogues.

 

When shapes are being re-sized or re-positioned, instead of just showing a rectangular profile of where the object will end up, we show a semi-transparent re-sizing preview of the new shape in its position at the new size:

 

Re-sizing preview:
Screenshot comparison between the old and new forms of scaling a picture in Collabora Online

 

In addition to make shape insertion easier we added a palette of all the built-in custom shapes allowing easy insertion of new shapes into the document.

screenshot of the brand new shape palette

Mobile device improvements

Mobile device support has improved significantly in this release in a number of critical areas. Time to first document load is improved – though it has always been possible to load, layout and calculate large and complex documents on the server – avoiding complexity and battery life impact on a small mobile device.

We have introduced a simple, stripped down viewing mode at first, to make it easier to view documents in an uncluttered way.
Stripped down viewing mode:

Screenshot collabora Online 4.0 Mobile view docScreenshot of Collabora Online 4.0 Mobile TOC

 

Toolbars are easier to use, can auto-hide, and scroll to allow a wider selection of commonly used functionality. The menus are also far easier to scroll and interact with deeper menu hierarchies.

Pinch to zoom, pan, and other multi-touch behaviors are also improved, along with the ability to zoom and pan into different areas of complex dialogues allowing the full rich functionality of the desktop designed dialogues that are larger than a mobile screen to be used conveniently.

 

Zooming and panning into different areas of complex dialogues:

 

Animated gif displaying zooming capabilities within dialog windows

 

Improvements to the special character dialog making it easier to use favorite characters in 4.0 are also visible here.

 

Retina / HiDPI display improvement

Version 4.0 now can take advantage of the browser’s native higher DPI to render at the display’s real resolution, getting crisp pixel rendering, for example at 200% zoom:

screenshot showing not so crisp pixel rendering of a dialogue at 200% zoom vs a hidpi variant
This has a significant effect across all components, and particularly Calc which now has a 200% zoom option.

Before and After:
screenshot showing not so crisp pixel rendering of calc screenshot showing crisp pixel rendering of Calc
 

By avoiding the browser needing to do a local scaling, we get much crisper text, and conditional formatting, as well as using your display to best effect.

We also moved to using scalable vector Colibre icons for dialogues, and rendering these at a higher resolution when needed too.

Writer improvements

Rich section properties

This feature provides users with the possibility to configure the attributes of sections of a Collabora Online Writer text document. For instance, a user can restrict editing to specific parts by locking certain sections of the text with a password in order to protect sections, perhaps legally sensitive, of a text from being changed.

Screenshot of Insert Section dialogue box from Writer

Inserting a multi-level Table of Contents

Users can now insert powerful Tables of Contents (TOC) and customize them to their preference. Adding a TOC to your documents easily provides an overview of a longer text based on the headings you have used helping readers to navigate through multiple pages easily and quickly. Use “Ctrl+Click Function” to jump to a heading or sub-heading in a document.

Dialogue box for inserting a table of contents in the Writer

Calc improvements

Page styling

Calc uses page styles to specify the layout of how we print pages, including line arrangement, line styles, background colour, paper format, margins, layout setting, headers, footers, and shadowing styles. These are applied via page styles you can re-use for other sheets.

Screenshot of Page Style dialogue box from Calc

Impress improvements

In Impress, every slide is based on a slide master. Masters also exist for notes, and handouts. Every type of master has predefined areas for date, header, footer, and slide numbers whose styles can be customized. When editing online, to provide quick information about your contents, you need to be able to create, edit, and customize the Header and Footer as well as Bullets and Numbering features. Here’s some descriptions and screenshots of the dialogues.

Header and footer

This feature allows you to create a header and footer for your slides, notes and handouts, without having to editing the Masters themselves.

Bullets and numbering

This allows rich customization of the position, type and size of bullets and numbering to create the ideal lists. All the changes can be made using the Bullets and Numbering dialog box, which can be accessed through the Format menu.

Animated Screenshot of Bullets and Numbering dialogue box from Impress

Miscellaneous Online improvements

  • Security and document jail creation performance – particularly on stackable file-systems – has been significantly improved by removing all of the Collabora Office code from the document jails.
  • Improved Thumbnailing API via accelerated convert-to implementation, allowing easier file browsing.
  • Translations have been expanded, thanks to the enthusiastic LibreOffice teams to include reasonable localizations to thirty-seven popular languages.

Improvements from Collabora Office 6.0

Collabora Online re-uses the same underlying core document rendering and interoperability engine based on LibreOffice provided by Collabora Office 6.0. Collabora Online 4.0 upgrades us to the new 6.0 version – which includes many improvements from the wider LibreOffice community, such as:

  • many improvements across Visio, MS Publisher, Keynote, Pages & Numbers filters (thanks to the Document Liberation Project)
    document liberation logo
  • Much improved EMF+ rendering (thanks to Bartosz Kosiorek)
  • Spreadsheet loading and calculation performance improvements
  • Substantially improved EMF+ (OLE object) preview rendering
  • Improved table styles & border rendering
  • Improved interoperability – with many improvements to OpenXML (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX) support, support for new attributes, and wins for legacy SmartArt shapes without DrawingML fallback.

For more details, and credits around Collabora Office 6.0 please see https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-office-6-0/

 

Getting Collabora Online 4.0

Collabora Online is suitable for large scale deployment, comes with an SLA, Long Term Support with signed security updates as well as a rich product management interaction helping to direct our development priorities.

Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. For tailored solutions, contact sales@collaboraoffice.com.

Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner by filling in the partner form or contacting sales@collaboraoffice.com.

Collabora Online is only one part of a larger Enteprise File Sync & Share, Groupware, or Hosting solution. Collabora is excited to go to market with a long list of Partners each of which has an integration.

Online demo

You can get an online demo of Collabora Online and try it out yourself right now!

Try the Online Demo

For more information:

About Collabora Productivity:

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it 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, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the 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.

Thanks for a great 2018

Eloy Crespo Leave a comment

As we come to Christmas and the new year, it is great to reflect on everything that we’ve achieved this year. Collabora Productivity would not exist without the funding, support and friendship of our partners and customers. When reviewing what we’ve achieved we’re really grateful for your trust & input into our product development, helping to guide which features and fixes we invest in next. Of course we could do nothing without our talented staff – who have worked extremely hard to turn your ideas into working code, alongside a wide community of volunteers.

Because of you 2018 turned out to be an outstanding year! Here are a few tastes of what we achieved with links to the full details:

 

Collabora Online improvements

Collabora Online 3.0

In February we had a major release, bringing for the first time the infrastructure necessary to bring many rich dialogs to the browser:

Calc format cells dialog

This release also brought change tracking management, a thesuarus, sorting and auto-filtering, IPv6 support, PAM integration, and much more. It formed the base for a series of incremental fix and improvement releases through the year.

Collabora Online 3.1

The key feature in this update, requested by our Asian partners was much improved IME integration:

IME integration shot of Chinese input

This release also brought support for chart data series editing, hidden tabs,

Collabora Online 3.2

In April we had an update, that brought chart creation to our existing chart editing functionality into writer, calc and impress, as well as data validation – allowing complex spreadsheet data entry:

New chart insertion dialogData validation in action

We also managed to include context menu spelling correction, column formatting, and a new scripting API for integrators.

Collabora Online 3.3

In June we brought another update that significantly improved clipboard paste – preserving formatting, tables, images and more. Another great win was the ability to paste text as CSV (Comma Separated Values) into Calc:

Pasting into calc shows rich CSV import options

We also took some time to allow people to set basic conditional formats, borders, and added a no-color option to the drop-down:

New convenient drop-downs

We also included responsive design improvements for mobile, as well as options to anonymize document and user names when logging and cleaning up our warning dialogs. We also added the ability to connect a remote monitoring server for better Alfresco locking integration and powerful cluster management. With some more fixes and improvements in a 3.1.1 follow up release

Collabora Online 3.4

In October we brought a major set of improvements with significantly improved interactivity halving typing latency in many cases:

Slide highlighting halving of latency

We also improved our mobile experience, impress slide-sorter performance, as well as allowing a configurable web root and other fixes. With a pair of 3.4.1 and 3.4.2 minor releases to further address partner issues.

CODE 4.0 RC1

In December we released a major refresh and upgrade as a base for a Collabora Onine 4.0 release in 2019. This refreshed the look of toolbars with a fresh new look from Colibre:

Refreshed toolbar look

This included lots of ergonomic improvements, improved shape editing controls with re-sizing previews and a convenient palette to insert shapes. A large number of mobile device improvements were also made – including a stripped-down viewing mode, with auto-hiding, scrollable toolbars, and panning menus. We also added zoom & pan of complex dialogs allowing access to rich desktop functionality on mobile:


screenshot of collabora online from mobileZooming and panning into different areas of complex dialogues

Retina / HiDPI display improvements make text look crisp using the browser’s details to render at the display’s real resolution, getting crisp pixel rendering (example at 200% zoom):

screenshot showing not so crisp pixel rendering of calc   screenshot showing crisp pixel rendering of Calc

Collabora Office 6.0 brings major improvements

Every year, we refresh Collabora Office; our enterprise-grade, long term supported open-source office suite. Collabora Office 6.0 brought a host of new features and interoperability improvements. After all the work on interoperabilty and our creation of an innovative new interoperbility tool: COLEAT, we called Collabora Office 6.0 The Migrator’s Choice.

COLEAT interoperability tool

One of the major problems large enterprises often have is un-documented, legacy line of business applications often written in VB using COM to drive and re-use Microsoft Office. With Collabora Office 6.0 we have created a great new complementary interoperability tool: COLEAT that lets Collabora Office 6.0 act as a drop-in replacement via our compatibility APIs. It also implements a tracing tool to allow easy troubleshooting it complements our work making many more VBA macro driven documents work out of the box.

COLEAT - replace with Collabora Office

Checkout a video of COLEAT in action.

Improving Interoperability

Several of our partners asked us to improve PPTX interoperability so we invested a chunk of time in improving round-trip fidelity between Powerpoint and Collabora Office, avoiding unnecessary warnings, fixing export of group shapes, export of embedded videos, and preservation of customXML on export. We also implemented PPTM (PPTX with macros) – preserving the VBA streams on export. Other hard to visualize fixes around animations were done too, as well as improving document layout:

Much improved PPTX interoperability

Other 6.0 pieces:

In 2018 – we deprecated the GovOffice brand, and made 5 years of support lifetime an option that can be ordered for Collabora Office. We included large numbers of features and fixes which we had implemented for our customers on top of LibreOffice 5.3 as well – from mail-merge, ADMX lock-down improvements, autotext import improvements, SharePoint lists / IQY import and much more.

We continued to implement small new features and fixes on top of 6.0 through 2018 including a built-in MariaDB/MySQL connector, font effect transformations and other VBA and interoperability fixes as well as ongoing security updates. In 2019 we’ll be releasing Collabora Office 6.2 incorporating another round of Collabora and community development by mid 2019.

Collabora Online for bulk Document Conversion

One thing that we tried to encourage this year is the move to using Collabora Online’s built-in REST API for Document Conversion – which can re-use all the efficiency, sharing and security improvements we’ve built into Collabora Online. Good process management of conversions, size limits, timeouts with hard-killing the few processes that mis-behave – all in a friendly package. And of course faster than JODConverter and unoconv too:

Graph showing improved conversion performance of Collabora Online

We could also enjoy spending the time tweaking various conversions to accelerate specific cases. It is great to be able to focus on specific conversions and squeeze out some low hanging fruit, eg. 5x faster ODT → XHTML

https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4608/39674632615_de78265c7f_o.png

Adding, and using lots of new options such as NoFileSync, NoThumbnail, HiddenForCovnersion, and lazy loading autoformat tables when they’re actually needed.

Adfinis & Collabora bring LibreOffice to iOS

In 2018 thanks to a joint investment with Adfinis to address different customers of ours, we brought Collabora Online to iOS, with lots of interesting details and a pretty picture:

A presentation under iOS

Why not get involved in development using TestFlight and help us meet our goal of a good, Open Source, offline office suite solution in the first half of 2019.

Yet more LibreOffice goodness

Of course, we contribute all of our code changes back to LibreOffice, or
the relevant up-stream project. We love to contribute to and work alongside
the LibreOffice community (infographic). Serving with two seats on the TDF Board and Membership Committee, as well as being Advisory Board members.

We sponsored the LibreOffice conference (summary) and ran a team build event for those of our partners that didn’t mind getting wet:

Team building stand up paddle

And also celebrated the 5th birthday of Collabora Productivity, and enjoyed the FLOSS weekly experience:

five years cake cutting

Thanks to TDF’s generous donors we significantly improved image handling inside LibreOffice, as well as working towards enabling Firebird migration in base.

Thanks to AMD we’ve managed to hugely improve parallel CPU computation of large spreadsheets, and test all available bug documents with both threading and OpenCL to ensure great behavior in all known corner cases. We’ve also re-worked text rendering to avoid lots of redundant re-shaping of the same text – accelerating complex text locales.

Working with SUSE, we have recently started to improve our support for SmartArt where shape fallbacks are missing, and making some progress towards sensible constraint-based layout of diagrams from Office files, follow Miklos’ blog for improvements working towards LibreOffice 6.3.

We’ve also managed to fix large numbers of bugs, and continue to do large scale cleanups of the C++ core to make it easier to develop against – more detail than can fit in what started as a short write-up.

Summary

Just a taste, a few screenshots and some pointers towards more details of what has been achieved. Thank you once again to all who worked with us as partners, customers who funded everything we do, and community who made it fun. We’re looking forward to achieving even more next year, if you’d like to get involved its easy to partner with us, buy from us, or to get involved in the community. And finally – thanks to the whole team that worked so hard to make it all happen.

Happy Christmas and New Year to our partners