Collabora will be attending the Nextcloud conference – an annual conference that brings the global Nextcloud Contributor Community together for a week of coding, design, discussion, talks & fun. The conference will be held from 23 to 30 of August 2018 in Berlin, Germany – at the Mathematics building of the Technical University of Berlin.
During the hackweek days participants will get together to code, write Nextcloud apps, improve design etc. On the weekend of August 25 and 26, will be different talks, keynotes, and workshops. Our own Tor Lillqvist will be there to talk about Collabora Online. His talk will be on August 25 at 11:32 AM and will present the work we have done on Collabora Online during the last year.
August 27, will be the Enterprise Day that takes place the day after the Nextcloud conference and features a track of technical sessions covering a wide range of enterprise use cases. Michael Meeks will have a talk about Collabora Online – if you want to know more about us feel free to attend his talk at 11:30 – Park Inn at Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Say hi to us!
Do you have any questions, feedback or you just want to hack with us? Let’s meet in Berlin at the Nextcloud conference – drop us an email at hello@collaboraoffice.com and we would be very happy to meet you there.
This weekend you can find us in two different conferences, where our team members will conduct a talk.
In Almeria, Spain…
From 11th to 13th May – we will be in Almeria, Spain to speak at National Congress on Software Development (SUPERSEC) conference. Michael Meeks will talk about securing your documents online. His talk with be on Saturday, May 12th at 4 pm.
Around the same time, we will be attending another event as well. On May 12th we will be in Osaka, Japan. One of our engineers, Tomaž Vajngerl, will explain the changes in LibreOffice 6.x from a developer point of view.
Collabora will be attending CS3 – an event focused on non-traditional working storage: Cloud Storage Services for File Synchronization and Sharing (CS3). At CS3 particular attention is given to scientific and engineering applications and environments. The fourth edition of Cloud Services for Synchronisation and Sharing (CS3) Conference will be held from 29th-31st January 2018 in Krakow, Poland, to review the state-of-the-art and share experiences about cloud storage services.
Our own Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky will be there to talk about Collabora Online. His talk will be on January 31st at 11 AM and will be focused on real-time collaboration on documents. He will explain more details about Collabora Online and how it integrates into many File Sync&Share products to create an industry leading powerful, secure, real-time, open source document editing experience.
If you have any questions about us or any feedback, feel free to ask Jan.
See you there!
We are looking forward to the LibreOffice Conference 2017, starting on October 11 in Rome, Italy! Just like at the previous LibreOffice conferences, there will be talks from people that work at Collabora Productivity, talking about LibreOffice desktop and Online development, new features, security, testing, use cases and a lot more!
You can find more detailed info on the talks from Collabora, ordered by date and time, below:
Filing better interoperability bugs – from users to development
An essential aspect of LibreOffice is that it can work with documents coming from other office suites. During that, however, we are bound to run into interoperability issues. This talk aims to give techniques that can be used by end users and QA people alike to take a closer look at these issues and process the documents causing bugs, without much information about the formats (eg. to create minimal examples), to provide more relevant details to developers in the bug reports.
The LibreOffice code-base is huge. Finding the relevant source code for your bug or feature can be challenging initially. The talk will walk though a number of key modules in our codebase and will give a brief summary on them. Also code documentation techniques used in our code (doxygen, per-module README files) will be presented as well. Come and see how to get from the user interface to the relevant source code, what still lacks documentation and how you can help.
Speaker: Miklos Vajna Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
VBA, the programming language of Excel and other Microsoft Office programs, is also interpreted by LibreOffice with more or less success. Among others, the company D-Wave, the world’s first quantum computing company, decided to use LibreOffice for running their VBA script, using its VBA support. The talk will walk through the improvements made on LibreOffice in order to be able to run the above mentioned macro and improve the efficiency of interpreting vba scripts.
Speaker: Tamas Bunth Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
LibreOffice Online – new features since the last year
LibreOffice Online is an exciting technology that allows people to edit documents and collaborate on them in a web browser. It is rapidly developing, and has improved a lot since the last year. Come and see all the new exciting features that did not exist in the LibreOffice Online one year ago – like the collaborative editing, user friendly comments, resizing cells in spreadsheets, and much more.
Speaker: Jan Holesovsky Room: Sala della Commissioni
Pivot charts are a new feature available in LibreOffice 5.4, which introduces the ability for charts to use the output of the pivot table as its source of data. With pivot charts it is very easy to visualize the data and extract the desired information by modifying the pivot table. This talk explains how to create and use the pivot charts, and the experience during development.
Speaker: Tomaz Vajngerl Room: Sala della Commissioni
As security becomes increasingly more important in a highly digital world, signing and validation of digital documents becomes critical. This talk presents a new feature that allows the signing and verification of individual paragraphs in Writer using a cryptographically secure certificate. The signatures are stored as RDF metadata in the document and visually represented by text fields, which shows the signer, date and validity state.
Speaker: Ashod Nakashian Room: Sala della Protomoteca
Per-Improved interoperability of Writer’s features
Presentation of newly implemented features which are improving interoperability with other office suits. Including: DOCX AutoText import, custom Watermarks, better handling of embedded documents (OLE) and solved problems in the Writer with developer’s comment.
A group of users got used to select name and address data for mail merge from a table in a text document, in another office suite. When these users were migrated to LibreOffice, they wanted the same feature, but it was missing. The presentation will show the details how a Writer data source driver was added to connectivity module of LibreOffice.
Speaker: Andras Timar Room: Sala della Protomoteca
Native comments and change tracking support in LibreOffice Online
An overview of the journey of moving from the tiled comment rendering in LibreOffice Online to native comments in javascript with the help of comments API exposed by LibreOfficeKit. We’ll also look into native change tracking support making your experience of editing and reviewing documents much more smoother.
LibreOffice Online is an exciting technology that allows people to edit documents and collaborate on them in a web browser. LibreOffice Online can be integrated into any web service simply via a combination of an iframe and the WOPI protocol.
To make the integration smoother, there are various extensions possible, like adding your own buttons to the toolbars, reacting on various events from the LibreOffice Online, or using some handy WOPI extensions. Come and hear what is possible, and how to achieve the level of integration you need.
Speaker: Jan Holesovsky Room: Sala della Protomoteca
This talk would discuss how instead of reimplementing the same functionality available in various dialogs by writing thousands of lines of code in javascript, we are routing the dialogs from LibreOffice core to LibreOffice Online. I’ll talk about the implementation, routing to LibreOffice Online, and present a demo of the current state. Towards the end, we’ll look into future improvements, scope and further challenges.
Come and hear how we do unit testing for Collabora Online – vital if you want to add a feature, or implement a fix. Understand how the system of ‘hooks’ allows cheap, yet invasive message & fault injection. Understand the several layers of old & new testing methods, and see how you can get involved.
Speaker: Michael Meeks Room: Sala della Protomoteca
When I meet with users in person the most frequently mentioned issue is that LibreOffice (LO) messes up Microsoft Office (MSO) documents. Well, I understand how frustrating it is, but let’s talk about why it’s this hard to be compatible with MSO. In these days OOXML formats are used most often, so it’s important to have our OOXML filters upodated.
I’ll speak about my experiences about working with OOXML filters. I’ve done some development with different LO components during the last year, so I’ll bring examples from these different areas (Writer, Impress, Calc). The OOXML support of LO has limitations, sometimes it comes from missing features, sometimes it comes from the bad design of filter code. While showing the examples I’ll mention where the code can be improved, what issues you should be aware of while developing this part of the code and also mention some entry points for interested developers.
Speaker: Tamas Zolnai Room: Sala della Commissioni
Approaching the 1M columns / rows limit in Calc Online
The goal of providing to the user the ability of working with a 1 million rows spreadsheet in Calc Online requires several improvements. Some of these improvements have already been achieved and involves special handling of the row/column header, scrolling and document navigation. For row/column header that means fetching only the header heighs/widths for the current visible section of the document. This feature improves both document loading time, minimizes data traffic between the core and client and more responsive row/column operations, such as insertion, deletion or resizing. In this talk will be illustrated how this result has been achieved by the synchronization of header data fetching with mouse/key scrolling and through caching the current cell position.
Speaker: Marco Cecchetti Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
Come hear a case-study of how LibreOffice was deployed in a UK Hospital. Hear how the project was planned, the cost-savings, the trials and successes, the benefit of real support – with new features & bug fixes implemented, improving LibreOffice for everyone.
Speaker: Michael Meeks Room: Sala della Commissioni
It seems clear that in the future computers will become more powerful not so much any more by increasing the per-core processing power, but by increasing the number of cores available per processor chip. To take advantage of that in LibreOffice Calc, doing large formula group calculations in parallel is an obvious solution. Earlier, increased parallelism has been approached through the use of OpenCL. This has worked in some ways, and in other ways perhaps been less succesfull than was hoped. This talk describes a new approach which uses plain C++ level multi-threading.
Speaker: Tor Lillqvist Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
If we place nice with the hardware, it will make our lives easier. In the old days, we expended considerable effort to make our global analyses more efficient, especially when dealing with large codebases like LibreOffice. However, with the advent of modern hardware and software tools this has become largely necessary. This talk will focus on some pragmatic design choices that lead to being able to run global analysis passes across the LibreOffice codebase, without breaking the bank on hardware or waiting days for results.
Speaker: Noel Grandin Room: Sala della piccola Protomoteca
How to stop blocking and learn to love non-blocking sockets
The challenge of converting blocking sockets to non-blocking in the production-ready LibreOffice Online, while maintaining quality and stability, was met for the 2.0 release earlier this year. This talk is an overview of the journey from discovering the limitation of blocking socket, and the mechanisms and methods used to build a non-blocking framework and converting the codebase over. The details of how the highly threaded, thread-synchronization-laden design was de-threaded into a simple, single polling-thread model, with callback-scheduling, ownership, life-time management, and thread-affinity is presented.
Speaker: Ashod Nakashian Room: Sala della Protomoteca
LibreOffice: SharePoint integration. A year of progress
The talk is targeted to discuss the previous state of the SharePoint support in LibreOffice, the issues that were solved during this time, and some of remaining problems/goals that LibreOffice is still facing.
Speaker: Mike Kaganski Room: Sala della Protomoteca
The LibreOffice PDF filter got multiple updates during the past year. The introduction of PDF signature verification, signing existing PDF files, rendering PDF images with pdfium and various general PDF export fixes all happened in this period. A new testsuite has been added to catch PDF export regressions early. The talk will walk through a number of situations where improvements have been done and present the results. Come and see where we are, what still needs to be done, and how you can help.
Speaker: Miklos Vajna Room: Sala della Protomoteca
From August 22 until August 29, Nextcloud held their annual conference, including a enterprise day, providing enterprise focused talks about large scale use of Nextcloud, security, scalability, Real Time & Secure Collaboration with Collabora Online, and much more.
Collabora Productivity’s General Manager Michael Meeks gave a talk about Collabora Online in Nextcloud. Collabora Online is a powerful LibreOffice-based online office that supports all major document, spreadsheet and presentation file formats, which is easy to deploy in Nextcloud, as a simple extension. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file format support.
Collabora Online at Nextcloud Conference recording
In his talk Michael explained how Collabora Online improved in the last year, and mentioned Nextcloud / integration wins, such as significant performance wins and public link editing. And, some other very interesting info was shared. The complete presentation was recorded and has been made available by Nextcloud. Check out the video above!
