Thank you for a great 2023!

Thank You for Everything We Achieved Together in 2023 🤝

At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team alongside our worldwide network of partners and the community. 2023 was a particularly significant year for us as we celebrated ten years of Collabora Productivity, adding another productive decade to our mission of bringing document editing and trillions of existing documents into the free world!

 

 

In March we held another successful COOL Days conference, this time in Cambridge, which brought together our team, partners and the community. We are looking forward to another great event in April 2024 – join us!

As well as our own events, our team also attended over ten locations to present talks, meet partners and share Collabora Online with the wider community. You can keep up to date with our adventures on our events page.

2023 saw many organisations and users throwing off their proprietary shackles, and embracing the freedom open-source solutions bring. In particular, we saw many educational institutions reconsidering their relationship with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace amid privacy concerns, great strides being taken by local and national governments such as the openDesk project in Germany, and increasing numbers of private companies taking back control of their document storage and editing needs.

Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen performance improvements and increased functionality. In July, we released the new major release of our flagship product Collabora Online 23.05, which included increased interoperability, performance boosts and a whole range of new features and accessibility improvements. Thank you for your support! Let’s take a deeper dive into what we have achieved together this year. 💜

 

Collabora Online 22.05 → 23.05

Our flagship product, Collabora Online saw marked improvements in 2023, introducing many exciting new features and a big focus on accessibility, working to bring the best digital experience we can to all our users, regardless of their abilities or challenges.

  • February 2023: Zotero plug in, PDF and EPUB export options, insert page number dialog, Duden Corrector plugin, easy hyperlink pop up editor
  • March 2023: linking API, improved conditional formatting from XLSX files.
  • April 2023: interoperability improvements.
  • July 2023: major release 23.05 introducing dark mode, expanded keyboard shortcuts, initial screen reading support, document themes, multi-page floating tables and accessibility improvements.
  • August 2023: further updates to keyboard shortcuts and more performance improvements.
  • September 2023: new font previews and barcode/QR code functionality.
  • October & November 2023: a focus on polishing and bug fixing with over 70 improvements.
  • December 2023: STYLEREF, floating tables properties, re-designed PostMessage for integrators and developers.

See the full release notes for Collabora Online 23.05 and COOL 22.05.

 

CODE: Developing a Rock-Solid Enterprise Version 💪

The latest major release of the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) 23.05 was released in June. CODE always appears in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online – the Development Edition contains all new features which are extensively tested before becoming available in the Enterprise version (COOL). An overview of CODE releases for 2023 can be found in the release notes but will mostly mirror those of Collabora Online. You can find the conversations about CODE on social media, by searching for the hashtag #cool_dev on Mastodon or Twitter.

 

Powerful New Features for Collabora Office on the Desktop 🖥️

August 2023 saw the latest major release of Collabora Office, our long term supported desktop Office Suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release brought a number of powerful productivity features focusing on accessibility and improving user experience. The new features contain code that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. Collabora Office for Windows is available through the Microsoft Store. The latest version for macOS can be bought from the App Store. We also appreciate those who help us test the latest features inside our unstable snapshots.

  • August 2023: major release of Collabora Office 23.05 including dark mode, interoperability features, document themes, 64-bit zip support, advanced editing features for tables and forms and so much more!
  • September 2023: MS Office interoperability improvements including further support of document themes, floating tables and pivot tables.
  • December 2023: Collabora Office 23.05.6 – STYLEREF, floating tables properties and advanced header and footer functionality.

Many new Features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱

Our major release for mobile and tablet devices in September 2023 brought more of the functionality from Collabora Online into the pockets of our users, as well as improving the current user experience and making navigating on smaller screens easier. Now you can use dark mode, improved form controls in Writer, Sparklines, consistent dialogs and a better UX for users on smaller screened devices.

 

Events 🗓️

COOL Days 2023 took place in Cambridge, with more than 50 participants joining from our team, partners and the community. We presented 45 lightning talks showcasing our talented developers’ work across the year, held workshops and discussions with our partners about the importance of data protection in Europe, shared our development roadmap, and further discussed how to mutually support our sales and marketing efforts as part of our partnership. The community dived into a LibreOffice Hackfest and of course we had a great time socialising and team building around historic Cambridge.

 

 

 

As well as our own annual conference, our team attended events across Europe presenting talks, meeting partners and sharing Collabora Online, as well as presenting a keynote at the LibreOffice Conference for Latin America in Mexico.

2023 Events

 

Date Event Location Links
17th – 18th January 2023 Univention Summit Bremen, Germany Blog
4th – 5th February 2023 FOSDEM Brussels, Belgium Blog & Talks
6th – 8th March 2023 CS3 Barcelona, Spain Talk Recording
28th – 29th March 2023 COOL Days Cambridge, UK Blog, Live Stream
16th – 17th September 2023 Nextcloud Conference Berlin, Germany Blog & Talks
20th – 23rd September 2023 LibreOffice Conference Bucharest, Romania Blog & Talks
28th – 29th September 2023 SeaDays Mainz, Germany Talk
7th – 9th November 2023 Smart Country Convention Berlin, Germany openDesk Blog
9th – 10th November 2023 LibreOffice Congreso Latin America Mexico City, Mexico Keynote
6th – 7th December 2023 Open Source Experience Paris, France Talk Slides

 

LibreOffice Community & Contributions to 7.5 and 7.6

Collabora Productivity is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice technology. We are the largest contributor to the LibreOffice codebase, with our developers contributing many commits to the LibreOffice core.

LibreOffice 7.5 and LibreOffice 7.6 saw many improvements from the team at Collabora – here is just a snapshot of some of the commits this year.

  • Content controls – added plain text type, combo box, PDF export, titles and tags. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Impress now supports cropped video for media shapes. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Citation handling: added plumbing in Writer to build Zotero-like functionality. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Keyboard navigation through forms (Justin Luth, Collabora)
  • Replacing strings with numbers in Calc tdf#126109 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
  • Find and replace in very large Calc sheets tdf#150749 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
  • Added page number wizard in Insert menu for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer tdf#86630 (Paris Oplopoios / Justin Luth, Collabora)
  • Initial machine translation is available, backend by DeepL translate (Mert Tumer, Collabora) core commit e20d2tdf#34058
  • Added pivot table compact layout. core commit 2f8d1 (Dennis Francis, Collabora)
  • Display soft breaks as line breaks at fontwork. tdf#148000 (Attila Szűcs, Collabora)
  • Added support to open multi image tiff files tdf#155444 (Rashesh Padia, Collabora)
  • Auto fitting text scaling algorithm has been changed so it works similar to MS Office. (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora)

Of course, we also had many of our developers share their work in the LibreOffice Technology devroom at FOSDEM this year. You can find links to their talks and slides in our blog.

 

Partners

This year we have welcomed 20 new partners from across Europe, Australia and South America including Oodrive, Salesframe, Aridhia and unodata. We are very happy to have a growing partner network allowing more and more users to take control of their data.

Team

This year we have seen our team grow, adding another 17 people to our core team at Collabora Productivity within our Sales, Marketing and Technical teams, with 50% of these coming from the Collabora Online Community. We love to hire smart people who have contributed to the Open Source community. This allows us to provide a richer experience for our partners and customers.

Collabora Online Community Contributions

The Collabora Online Community kept growing and helped to improve the software through their commits, feedback, and translations. You can see from the stats above that our Community is doing great things! You too, can help to make Collabora Online better. Join the discussions in our forum, join our community calls every Thursday at 12pm CET, translate strings on Weblate, file bug reports or feature requests on GitHub and spread the word on Collabora Online!

 

The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️

The 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. This year we continued to add to our information to enable better integrations and clearer guidance.

A small sample of some 2023 updates:

 

Thanks to all who helped out!

It has been an exciting year here at Collabora Productivity, and we are so grateful to everyone who has been involved in 2023, and indeed for the past ten years – customers, partners, staff, and the community. We couldn’t have achieved any of these things without everyone working together so well. We have big plans for 2024 and are anticipating an even more exciting year ahead. We look forward to sharing it with you!

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to download Collabora Online. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank You!

 

News by Collabora Directly into your Inbox 📨

Keep up to date with our public newsletter. If you would like to receive regular updates with all the news and updates about Collabora Online, Collabora Office and future events, please sign up to our newsletter.

Tip: keep an eye on our new releases for more new features.

Thank you for a marvellous 2022!

Thank You for Everything We Achieved Together in 2022 🤝

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. Luckily, the year 2022 was less dominated by the global pandemic. Throughout the year, international travelling became easier and in-person events and conferences became much more common again. However, the world kept being shaken. The Russian assault on Ukraine emphasized once again the massive importance of digital sovereignty, as Michael Meeks pointed out in several of his talks, like his Digital Sovereignty talk at the SFScon22.

Collabora held the first in-person COOL Days 2022 in Berlin, which brought together partners, the team, and the community. Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen major performance improvements and increased functionality. We released the new major release of our flagship product Collabora Online 22.05, including performance boosts and impressing new features. Thank you for your support! Let’s take a look at what we have achieved together this year. 💜

Collabora Online 22.05: New Features and Better Performance 📈

With the release of version 22.05, Collabora Online reached new heights in performance, interoperability and usability. Many exciting features that had earlier been implemented and fine-tuned inside CODE 22.05, have been introduced this month.

Collabora Online 22.05 Brings Grammar Checking, Giant Spreadsheets and Performance Wins

Grammar check in a Writer Document in Collabora Online 22.05
Sparklines in Collabora Online 22.05
Translate using DeepL in Collabora Online
Consistent Language identification in Collabora Online 21.11

 

CODE 22.05 Cutting-Edge Features and Path to a Rock-Solid Enterprise Version 💪

The latest major release of the Collabora Online Development Edition CODE 22.05 was released in June. Versions of CODE always appear in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online. The Development Edition contains all new features which are extensively tested before being incorporated into the Enterprise version. An overview of CODE releases for the year 2022 can be found in the release notes. You can find the conversations about CODE on social media, by searching for the hashtag #cool_dev on Mastodon or Twitter.

 

More Groundbreaking Major Releases: Collabora Online 21.11✌️

The Year 2022 saw two major releases. In January, we released the enterprise version 21.11 of Collabora Online. It included a complete redesign of the sidebar, enhancing its responsiveness and had a strong focus on performance enhancements.

Collabora Online 21.11 Including a New Sidebar, RTL Support and Performance Boosts

  • January 2022, major release 21.11 introducing a quicker, “native” sidebar, right-to-left support, Calc-Excel compatible formulae and improved PPTX import
  • March 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.2 including Accessibility Checker, faster rotation of bitmap graphics, and an improved UX
  • April 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.3, dynamic configuration of multiple hosts and improvements for complex commenting cases
  • May 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.4, toggling between Compact View and Tabbed View now available through the user interface, several functions added to the UI’s
  • June 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.5, support of emphasis animations (spin, grow, shrink) in SVG presentation engine of Collabora Online Impress
  • August 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.6, many fixes added including the zoom factors in the glow and soft edge effects and the CSV import dialog
  • October 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.7, fixed selection of candidates for Japanese IME input, UI for adding print ranges in Calc, and override CheckFileInfo
  • October 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.8 several fixes like the SVG export of text fields, a memory leak related to the remote config feature, UI fixes
RTL support introduced in Collabora Online 21.11
Fast image rotation in Collabora Online 21.11.2
Consistent Language identification in Collabora Online 21.11

 

Powerful New Features for Collabora Office on the Desktop 🖥️

Collabora Office 22.05 Continues Enhancing Productivity and Interoperability

May 2022 saw the latest major release of Collabora Office, our long term supported desktop Office Suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release brought a number of powerful productivity features like spreadsheets with 16,000 columns, sparklines to Calc (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and saw linked paragraph and character styles arrive in Writer. The new features developed by Collabora are now also available in LibreOffice 7.4. Collabora Office for Windows is available through the Microsoft Store. The latest version for macOS can be bought from the App Store. Furthermore, we are encouraging you to help us test the latest features inside our unstable snapshots.

Further updates throughout the year included additional features & improvements:

  • September 2022, Collabora Office 22.05.6 including chart data tables, document themes in Impress, and content controls in Writer
  • November 2022, Collabora Office 22.05.8 new Content Control features (combo box, titles, tags) PDF export of the content controls mapped to PDF forms
16384 columns available in Calc in Collabora Office 22.05
Sparklines in Collabora Office 22.05
Enhanced interoperability of transparent shadows in tables in Collabora Office 22.05

Collabora Office 21.06 Saw Updates and Improvements

Numerous Fixes & Updates for Collabora Office 6.4

Moreover, the Collabora Office 6.4 branch saw numerous updates, mostly including fixes and performance and interoperability improvements. You can find these changes documented inside the release notes.

 

Many new Features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱

Collabora Office Brings Powerful Office Productivity to Your Pocket

This year saw a major update of Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS including numerous advanced productivity features, excellent document compatibility and a much improved user experience. The first major release to version 21.11 included performance improvements, a faster & responsive toolbar on tablets, enhanced contextual Toolbars, better shadow effects and much more.

  • April 2022, Collabora Office 21.11.3 for Android, iOS & Chrome OS – major release including Contextual toolbars, improved PPTX import, blurry shadows, soft edges for objects
  • August 2022, Collabora Office 21.11.6 for Android, iOS & Chrome OS – improved user experience and fixes
Improved Import of PPTX with Shaped Images

 

Contextual Toolbars enhancing the user experience
Improved Shadow Effects
Glow & Soft Edge effects

 

 Amazing News, Interesting Figures 📈

280 Partners Worldwide

In 2022, our large network of amazing partners kept growing. We can now rely on over 280 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!

 

Collabora’s Contributions to LibreOffice 7.3 and 7.4

Collabora is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice technology. Our developers are responsible for many commits to the LibreOffice core. Thanks to the sponsorship of our clients, we were able to introduce many new features and improvements to LibreOffice 7.3 and LibreOffice 7.4. The LibreOffice 7.3 release saw many performance focused enhancements (increased PDF export speed of some complex documents, faster loading of large RTL documents and insertion of large charts, rendering improvements in the Skia-based rendering backend and introduction of a Skia-based rendering backend on macOS). We also introduced numerous new features and interoperability improvements to LibreOffice 7.4. This version saw the arrival of native rich text and checkbox content controls support from Word, remote LanguageTool grammar checking, support for sparklines (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and the use of 16384 columns in Calc and support for WebP images. Find more technical background on some of our contributions inside this blog. More great stuff is going to arrive in LibreOffice 7.5. We appreciate any help in testing. You’ll find the latest features in a Collabora Office snapshot or a pre-released Dev-Version of LibreOffice.

Linked paragraph and character styles in Writer
Example with 3 types of sparklines

 

Collabora Online Community Contributions #cool_dev 📈

The Collabora Online Community kept growing and helped to improve the software through their commits, feedback, and translations. You can see from the stats above that our Community is doing great things! You, too, can help to make Collabora Online better. Join the discussions in our forum, translate strings on Weblate, file bug reports or feature requests on GitHub and spread the word on Collabora Online!

 

The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️

The 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. Of course, we added new documentations to the SDK this year for new features like the DeepL Translator (sponsored by Adfinis) or the LanguageTool Grammar Checker.

 

Starting at a Distance, Coming together in Person Again 🤝

The beginning of the year 2022 was still heavily impacted by the global pandemic. Major events like FOSDEM 2022 or the FOSSASIA Summit 2022 took place as remote events. Others had been rescheduled to a later date, like the Univention Summit. Luckily, throughout the year, travelling became easier again, and many conferences, such as the LibreOffice Conference in Milan, and the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin, could take place in person again. In October, we held our own COOL Days in Berlin – for the first time as an in-person meeting with the Collabora team, community and our partners.

COOL Days 2022 in Berlin

This year, for the first time ever, we were able to host the COOL Days as an in-person event. The three-day event focused exclusively on topics related to Collabora Online – and on some fun and team building experiences. Read the wrap-up of our activities from the community day, the partner day and the tech day on our blog. All the recordings of the talk from the Tech Day can be found on our playlist on YouTube, many slides can be found inside our repository on GitHub. The next COOL Days are coming very soon… Join us in Cambridge in March 2023!

COOL Days 2022 Impressions

Ready for take-off? We went skydiving.
Joining staff and partners at the COOL Days
Developer talks at the Tech Day

COOL Days 2022 Videos

Using DeepL in Collabora Online by Jan Holesovsky
Dynamic Font Download by Tor Lillqvist
PDF Export Advanced Options by Miklos Vajna

 

FOSDEM 2022 – A Massive Remote Experience

Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like 2022 – FOSDEM is one of the major gatherings for Open-Source developers. The Collabora team held several talks on Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Find the all videos of our talks in our FOSDEM 2022 playlist and all the slides in our blog.

Click image to download slides, click here for the video
Click image to download slides, click here for the video
Click image to download slides, click here for the video

 

Collabora at the LibreOffice Conference in Milan

This year’s LibreOffice Conference was held in Milan and saw many talks by the Collabora team. All the recordings are available in our YouTube playlist and the slides can be downloaded from our blog.

Click image to download slides, click here for the video
Click image to download slides, click here for the video
Click image to download slides, click here for the video

 

News by Collabora Directly into your Inbox 📨

Keep up to date with our public newsletter. If you would like to receive regular updates like this one on the news on Collabora Online, Collabora Office and future COOL Days events, please sign up to our newsletter.

Tip: keep an eye on our new releases for more new features.

 

Summary

It has been a very busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We have enjoyed 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 some challenging conditions that persisted in 2022. The Berlin edition of COOL Days was one of the highlights for us this year. We have big plans for 2023, some of them unfolding already in early spring! Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to download Collabora Online. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank You!

Collabora Office 21.11 for Android, iOS and Chrome OS Lifts Mobile Productivity to the Next Level


Powerful Office Productivity in Your Pocket

Cambridge, April 13, 2022 – Today we are pleased to announce the availability of a new major release of Collabora Office for mobile devices and Chromebooks. This version of our free app for Android, iOS and Chrome OS includes numerous advanced productivity features, excellent document compatibility and a much improved user experience.

“Collabora Office on Mobile is a real alternative to proprietary office editors on Android, iOS and Chrome,” said, Nicolas Christener, CEO at Adfinis. “We are pleased to have contributed to Collabora’s work on this new version, which delivers a much-improved tablet sidebar and user experience.”

“This version of Collabora Office brings a year of work and improvement both from our team and the underlying LibreOffice Technology, ” said, Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity.  “We love to work alongside the community, as well as partners like Adfinis who understand the importance of digital sovereignty for enterprise customers wanting to edit their documents on the go.”

 

Performance Improvements

Collabora Office 21.11 for mobile devices has inherited many performance improvements that we have been working on through the 6.4 life-cycle and have already been included in the Collabora Online core. We have been accelerating JavaScript, and we’ve made auto-spell checking and AutoFilter quicker.

Faster and More Responsive Sidebar on Tablets

Collabora Office 21.11 introduces a sidebar for tablets. This is both a performance and usability improvement. It uses the same new JavaScript engine as Collabora Online 21.11, making it far more responsive and natural looking. With its more snappy responding buttons and controls, it is a major improvement for all users.

Contextual Toolbars Enhance User-Experience

The new contextual toolbar in Collabora Office 21.11 improves the usability of the mobile application. The toolbar (at the bottom of the app) now reacts dynamically to the active selection. For example, if a user selects text the bottom bar will display actions related to text. If the user selects a shape, the bottom bar changes to display only actions related to that particular object type (shape) or the selected element (table, shape, image). Thanks Andreas Kainz for working on this 🙂

 

Improved Import of PPTX with Shaped Images

Collabora Office 21.11 includes many interoperability improvements around the import of PPTX files, that had first been introduced to the desktop and to Collabora Online. Images within shapes – even those converted to greyscale or mirrored – are now displayed true to the original on the mobile app.

 

Better Shadow Effects

In earlier versions of the mobile app, shadows used to be rendered as solid copies of objects. The new Blur option now allows for a more realistic rendering of the shadows. This option can be accessed via the Edit button inside the mobile app and the Shadows option in the dialog. A checkbox allows you to activate the blur effect. You can customise the blur effect with the plus and minus controls.

 

Glow and Soft Edge Effects for Shapes

Collabora Office 21.11 introduces further options, which allow you to manipulate shapes in a more granular way. Once a shape is selected, you can add and change Glow effects and Soft Edges through the Effect dialog available in the Edit menu. In addition, it is now possible to choose the colour and the degree of transparency of the effect. This function is also an interoperability improvement and is available for shapes across all document types (Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw).

Thanks to the Community

This release is a community effort, and we fully appreciate and acknowledge their hard work that has made it possible!  A few weeks ago, we already celebrated the wonderful work of these people in this blog post.

 

Download Collabora Office 21.11

Collabora Office for iOS, Android and Chrome OS is available through the Play Store and App Store. We also provide the latest snapshot .apk for Android for download! While the iOS version is already available to all users, the Android and Chrome OS releases will be rolled to Play Store users gradually. A vibrant and welcoming community has evolved around Collabora Online & Collbaora Office. If you would like to get in touch or get involved, visit us in the forum or on GitHub.

 

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing Collabora Online and 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 Collabora Office on Twitter .

Collabora Online 21.11 Delivers New Features and Interoperability Improvements

Powerful Document Collaboration in a Secure, Private Cloud Environment

Cambridge, January 20, 2022 – Today we are pleased to announce the availability of a major new release of Collabora Online, which makes collaborative editing even more productive. This new release enhances personal and team productivity with design improvements, as well as smoother document interchange through improved interoperability, better performance and more.

Collabora Online is the collaboration suite that offers businesses and professionals the best features, interoperability, LTS, and custom support in open source, while respecting user privacy and corporate data security.

 

Addressing the Needs of Our Users

This new major version of Collabora Online is a further example of our ongoing development and commitment to ensuring it continues to address the evolving needs of our users in a rapidly changing world where choice, distributed working, privacy and data security have never been more important.

 

Quicker Functional Sidebar

The new Sidebar is “native” to your browser, thus much more responsive and always functional and easy to use

Collabora Online 21.11 introduces a new “native” sidebar. It is both a performance and usability improvement. It is now drawn directly on the screen by the browser by JavaScript, and no longer constructed on the server and then sent to your browser, making it far more responsive and natural looking. With its more snappy responding buttons and controls, it is a major improvement for all users!

The new sidebar at a glance:

  • Polished appearance
  • Better user experience
  • Faster responding buttons
  • Faster responding drop-down menus.
Collabora Online 21.11: Many elements, like dropdown menus, respond much faster in the new native Sidebar

 

View Documents More Easily

A number of new buttons in the NotebookBar improve the user experience when viewing documents. Zooming, full-screen view or switching the sidebar on and off are now accessible via clear buttons in the layout tab, and no longer only via the status bars or the burger menu. It makes these frequently used functions even easier to find.

 

Performance Improvements

Collabora Online 21.11 brings together many performance improvements that we have been working on through the 6.4.x lifecycle as well as some more advanced optimisations. These are rather hard to screenshot for your viewing pleasure for obvious reasons, but the next two images are a try at least.

There is a lot to tell on asynchronous save, accelerating of JavaScript, saving network traffic, improved multi-user editing and more. Specifically, in spreadsheets, we’ve made auto-spell checking and AutoFilter quicker. Take a look at this performance blog post for more background from a technical point of view.

 

Ongoing Work!

We continue to work to profile and optimise uses-cases that are important to our users, and the upcoming 21.11 micro-releases will exhibit more continuous improvement in this area – as well as ongoing improvements to our document pixel compression to make things even faster and lighter. It’s well worth staying up-to-date with the latest releases.

 

Right-to-left Support Available for All Document Types

Collabora Online 21.11 now supports right-to-left (RTL) text input within all modules. This makes it easier to create and edit documents in Persian or Arabic. The text direction can be set in the “Format” tab under the option “Page Style” (or “Slide Style” for presentations). The code in Collabora Online can detect several RTL language settings and will mirror the user interface accordingly.

 

Calc-Excel Compatible Formulae Improvements

Many functions in Calc have been improved both to extend interoperability with Excel, and to add new functionality. Support for sheet-local scoped names has been added to INDIRECT(), and both TEXT() and OFFSET() have been adapted to various corner cases to behave identically to the competition. TEXTJOIN() and CONCAT() now handle array & matrix arguments row-wise for improved compatibility. In addition, functions that use powerful regular expressions now correctly honour case-insensitivity flags.

 

Interoperability Boosted by Improved PPTX Import

Collabora Online 21.11 includes many interoperability improvements around the import of PPTX files, which we had already implemented in Collabora Office. Images within shapes – even those converted to greyscale or mirrored – are displayed online true to the original.

 

Better Shadow Effects

In earlier versions, shadows used to be rendered as solid copies of objects. The new Blur option now allows for a more realistic rendering of the shadows. The options of the feature can be accessed via the Shadows tab in the Area dialog or directly through updated “native” Sidebar. This feature was initially developed during a GSoC 2020 for the LibreOffice project mentored by Collaborans and then implemented with further refinements in Collabora Office 21.06 and is now also available online.

 

Glow and Soft Edge Effects for Shapes

Collabora Online 21.11 introduces further features allowing to manipulate shapes in a more granular way. Once a shape is selected, you can choose the radius of the Glow effect and its Soft Edges within the sidebar using the Effects parameter. Furthermore, you can select the colour and the degree of transparency of the effect. This function improves interoperability as it can be used for all shapes across Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw.

 

Consistent Use Of Language Identification

The basic model of language annotation that Collabora Online inherited from the LibreOffice core explicitly assigned languages to regions of text. This can easily lead to unexpected results when documents created in one local language (without specifying it further) are opened by another user with a different local language setting. Instead of a powerful, but potentially confusing multi-languages result, Writer now resets the language to the user’s UI locale if no document language had been defined. The current behaviour is more consistent.

 

Shadowed Tables For Use in ODS and PPTX Presentations

Shadow effects are a great way to add depth and appeal to elements. They are available for many objects, such as shapes, and include a range of feature enhancements and parameters, such as the blur effect and transparency. For tables within presentations, shadows are now also available in Collabora Online through the Table Properties dialog.

 

Miscellaneous Changes

In addition to the larger features, there are, of course, numerous smaller changes:

  • Internet Explorer 11 – dropped. This saves significant code complexity in some areas e.g. copy-paste, simplifies testing, and removes legacy javascript polyfills.
  • Auto-cleanup – on by default. We now, by default, are more aggressive towards processes that are idle and are consuming a large amount of CPU, after around five minutes of this behaviour they are killed, to disable that checkout the ‘cleanup’ section in coolwsd.xml.
  • cool conversion. We have migrated our legacy loleaflet and lool paths to browser and cool – which impacts a number of configuration files and binaries. Integrators should continue to use the URLs they receive from the hosting/discovery end-point. Those with reverse proxy and/or HA setups may need to update their proxy configuration with a simple search & replace, please refer to updated documentation of proxy settings. For more information, please read our upgrade notes.

 

Thanks to the Community

This release is a community effort and we fully appreciate and acknowledge their hard work that has made it possible!  A few weeks ago, we already celebrated the wonderful work of these people in this blog post.

 

 

About Collabora Online

Collabora Online 21.11 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 organisations 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.

 

Thank you for an exciting 2021!

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

Pivot Tables in Collabora Online 6.4.x
Select & run macros in Collabora Online 6.4.7
Anchors in Collabora Online 6.4.10
Anchors in Collabora Online 6.4.10

 

⚡️ 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.

Improved PPTX import in Collabora Office 21.06
Powerful new Style Inspector tool in the Sidebar of Collabora Office 21.06
Collabora Office 21.06 makes it easier and more convenient to find and install extensions

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
Add Gutter Margins to text documents in Collabora Office 6.4-33
True to the original PPTX import if shaped bitmaps in Collabora Office 6.4-33

🧰 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.

New “native” Sidebar in CODE 21.11
CODE 21.11 includes a new “native” Sidebar
Apply glow and soft edge effects to objects in CODE 21.11
Improved PPTX import/export filters in CODE 21.11

🆕 Many new features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱

Large, user-friendly UI on tablets
CSV Import in Collabora Office on Android
Moving Sheets in Collabora Office on Android
Smart connectors in presentation in Collabora Office on Android
VBA macros in Collabora Office for Android

 

🏠 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.

Canonical, Nextcloud and Collabora deliver work-from-home solution to Raspberry Pi

📰 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!

collaboraoffice.com is available in new languages, including japanese.

 

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.

PDF signing improvements by Collabora in LibreOffice 7.1

 

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.

 

“Collabora Online for your documents” by Michael Meeks. Download the presentation!
“How Collabora Online development improves LibreOffice” by Jan “Kendy” Holešovský. Download the presentation!
“Porting LibreOffice to macOS on Apple Silicon” by Tor Lillqvist. Download the presentation!

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.

Download “Collabora Keynote” by Michael Meeks
Download “PDF and other graphic improvements” by Tomaž Vajngerl
Download “JSDialogs improvements over the past year” by Szymon Kłos

 

💪 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.

Tip: keep an eye on our new releases for more new features.

 

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!

Thank You!