Collabora at FOSDEM 2022

2022-01-262022-02-04 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

FOSDEM 2022 – Europe’s largest Open-Source Developers Meeting

FOSDEM 2022 will again take place as an online event. During two days the latest technical achievements of developers from all over the world will be presented. Our team is represented with 10 talks on the different aspects of LibreOffice Technology in the corresponding devroom.

Day 1: Saturday, February 5th 2022

Monica Madon (Canonical), Marius Quabeck (Nextcloud) and Pedro Silva (Collabora)

13:00 – Ubuntu stand

Contributing to Open Source Projects with Ubuntu, Nextcloud, and Collabora

Are you interested in contributing but don’t know where to start? Tag along and be part of the digital sovereign revolution! Everyone is welcome to join.

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Gülşah Köse

14:30 – 15:00 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

OOXML Document Analysis

Collabora developer Gülşah Köse, will explain how we respond when we receive a problematic OOXML document from a customer and demonstrate the solution to a sample bug.

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Miklos Vajna

16:00 – 16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Document Themes in LibreOffice Impress and Elsewhere

LibreOffice has been capable of handling colour palettes on its UI for a while. Meanwhile, the competition introduced document themes, which are a fixed set of 12 colours, to be attached to various parts of documents. See what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice and find out what still needs doing and how you can help.

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Gökay Şatır

17:00 – 17:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Canvas For Rendering UX

Gökay Şatır will present why we chose to use Canvas for rendering the UI and the document, and explain the structure we created to execute this task.

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Access your free Collabora Online demo

Day 2: Sunday, February 6th 2022

Mert Tümer

12:00 – 12:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Editing Simulation

Performance measurements are really challenging. This presentation by Mert Tümer covers how we can achieve reliable and repeatable performance tests by implementing clever tools that simulate realistic use cases.

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Jan Holesovsky

13:00 – 13:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

LibreOfficeKit Recent Developments

LibreOffice can be used by other applications via its C++ API called LibreOfficeKit. Primary use cases for this are document conversion and editing in Collabora Online. The LibreOfficeKit is currently being expanded. Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky will talk about these recent developments.

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Michael Meeks

14:00 – 14:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Online Performance – Making Collaborative Editing Quicker

Collabora Online has a novel model that re-uses the core LibreOffice Technology to provide rich collaborative editing. Recently, we have been focusing our development on improving the look and feel of document editing. Come and hear Michael Meeks talk about how Online performance wins are making browser-based collaborative editing quicker.

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William Gathoye

14:00 – Ubuntu stand

Setting up a Nextcloud Instance with Collabora on Ubuntu

Keeping full control over your personal data and documents, is more and more important. Learn how to create your own personal cloud with this easy built-in installation.

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Szymon Kłos

15:00 – 15:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Building Collabora Online UI Based on the LibreOffice Components

JSDialog is a “framework” for sharing UI components between Collabora Online and LibreOffice. It was used to bring the Sidebar, the NotebookBar, and dialogs to the web. It provides native HTML widgets connected to the original LibreOffice code, giving the user rich editing options even on mobile devices. Szymon Kłos will talk for a brief summary of what is already done and how it works.

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Pranam Lashkari

15:30 – 16:00 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online on Kubernetes – Setup & Deployment

See this talk by Pranam Lashkari for a comprehensive demonstration of how to deploy Collabora Online using Kubernetes.

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Ashod Nakashian

16:00 – 16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online: Async-Saving Design and Testing

This talk will explore the challenge of saving and uploading documents to the storage server in an asynchronous way, to improve performance, user experience and also ensure higher reliability and resiliency. Ashod Nakashian will cover both the design, as well as the challenges of testing a highly-critical component of a production product.

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Henry Castro

17:00 – 17:20 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Macro Dialog Feature

Come and hear Henry Castro talk on the implementation of a Macro Selector Dialog on the client side to execute VBA macros on the server side.

See details Join video & conversation

Visit the LibreOffice Technology devroom at FOSDEM 22

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 organizations 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!

2021-12-222021-12-23 Marc Rodrigues 1 Comment

Looking at what we have achieved together 🤝

At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team – in cooperation with our worldwide network of partners and the community. The year 2021 was again dominated by the global pandemic. While it had little impact on our work processes, it meant that personal encounters remained very rare.

At the same time, we launched the first COOL Days, a new event that brings together people interested in Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen major performance improvements and increased functionality this year. At the end of the year, we released CODE 21.11, which previews what our flagship enterprise product, due out in early 2022, will look like. Thank you, for your support this year. See what we have achieved together this year. 💜

🆕 Collabora Online includes new functionalities and better performance 💻

This year Collabora Online has undergone a number of important updates. In addition to interoperability and user experience, there was a strong focus on performance enhancements. Many ground-breaking new functionalities already celebrated their premiere in the 6.4 release branch. With the release of CODE 21.11, more new implementations from the desktop were added.

Collabora Online 6.4 adds ground-breaking features

January, Version 6.4.3: Pivot tables, statistical tools and more features arrive in Collabora online.
January, Version 6.4.4: It is now possible to add shadows to tables in Impress. ODF 1.3 support arrived.
February, Version 6.4.6: Gutter margins improve production of printed documents and Fontwork adds graphical textart to all online modules.
March, Version 6.4.7: Draw is now available online and VBA macros start being enabled.
April, Version 6.4.8: Smart connectors are now available online.
June, Version 6.4.9: Convenient CSV import from mobile devices introduced.
August, Version 6.4.10: This version was a major update including many performance and interoperability improvements plus new features like Headers & Footers in presentations.

Select & run macros in Collabora Online 6.4.7

⚡️ 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.

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📱

January, version 6.4.3: Pivot tables, statistical tools and a more user-friendly UI for tablets is implemented
September, version 6.4.11: Performance improvements implemented
October, version 6.4.13: Many new features like Draw, CSV import, Fontwork text art, smart connectors and tablet specific UI improvements added
December, version 6.4.14: More fixes included on Android, iOS and Chrome OS

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.

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!

Collabora presenting the 2021 LibreOffice & Online growth infographic

2021-10-272021-10-27 Cor Nouws Leave a comment

In the aftermath of this year’s LibreOffice conference, we are glad to provide you with the latest update of our LibreOffice growth infoGraphic, including beautiful visuals and interesting numbers! We do hope you appreciate it and would love to hear your feedback. And of course, it is great if you find the format, in which it is presented, convenient to share.

Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic in general, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Although the total number of contributions to the LibreOffice core has slightly dropped compared to the year before, our developers remain top code contributors to LibreOffice with 4188 code commits (32.3%). The popular Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE), for home use & small teams, saw over 70 million Docker image pulls! We are glad to acknowledge, that the move of Collabora Online to GitHub has resulted in an increased number of contributions from the community. We are truly grateful to the growing number of partners, customers and volunteers for making this work possible.

The number of worldwide Collabora Online partners has raised to 230, the Collabora Office app for Android, iOS and Chrome OS saw 500,000 installations and the last year’s joint online conference by LibreOffice and SUSE did welcome over 130 participants from all over the world.

Would you like to see some previous versions of the info graph? Please find them here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016.

So, without further ado, please have a look at the updated LibreOffice growth infoGraphic on 2021 here:

Try Collabora Office and Collabora Online!

Talks and Slides by Collabora at the LibreOffice Conference 2021

2021-10-202021-10-29 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Watch the talks and download the slides of Collabora’s contributions to LibOCon 2021

The LibreOffice Conference 2021 (LibOCon) was held from September 23rd to 25th as an online event. Developers from Collabora have contributed a significant number of talks on various aspects of LibreOffice technology, like interoperability or performance improvements, and regarding Collabora Online and the ecosystem. Did you miss any of those? Don’t worry! The talks are available for you on YouTube. We also encourage you to download the slides of the presentations available in this overview.

Day 1: Thursday, September 23rd, 2021

Michael Meeks: Collabora Keynote

Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity and member of the LibreOffice Board, looks at the latest developments around LibreOffice from an organizational and ecosystem perspective. See details

Noel Grandin: I feel the need… The need for speed…

Optimization is a lengthy process. But also an adventure that requires a bit of detective instinct and plenty of exploratory talent. Discover which adjustments are being made to make LibreOffice even faster and better performing. See details

Marco Cecchetti: Some improvements for the SVG export filter

Marco Cecchetti reports on progress around the use of SVG in presentations and the improvements in performance and storage requirements on export. See details

Tomaž Vajngerl: Improved document searching with LibreOffice

Collabora developer Miklos Vajna introduces the latest enhancements to LibreOffice and Collabora Online search that visualize hits across different documents. See details

Mike Kaganski: Multi-column support in LibreOffice 7.2

The new feature, its relevance, obstacles and implementation status. Mike Kaganski shares his experience, how interesting was it to work on this. See details

Day 2: Friday, September 24th, 2021

Cor Nouws: A year of COOL …

Find out about the improvements that LibreOffice technology in the browser experienced. Hear about success stories and new features in Collabora Online! See details

Michael Meeks COOL performance

Recently, we have been focusing our Collobora Online development on improving the feel and slickness of document editing. Come and hear about the things that we’ve found and fixed, both in COOL and also in the LibreOffice core to improve the experience! See details

Sarper Akdemir: PPTX footer export & import interoperability

Sarper Akdemir outlines the challenges around the export & import of Footers in PPTX and how they have been mastered. See details

Miklos Vajna: Gutter margin in Writer page styles

LibreOffice was already capable of handling various margins in Writer page styles. A missing piece was the support for the gutter margins. Find out, how this was implemented! See details

Tomaž Vajngerl: Built-in “Xray” like UNO object inspector

When developing macros and extensions in LibreOffice, it is very useful to have an object inspector. The Document Foundation put up a tender to create a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. It was awarded to Collabora, and we are now in the process of implementing it. See details

Tomaž Vajngerl: PDF and other graphic improvements

The LibreOffice technology in Draw is key to PDF annotations, and the support of a recently added review-based workflow. Find out, how this has been implemented! See details

Day 3: Saturday, September 25th, 2021

Szymon Kłos: JSDialogs improvements over the past year

JSDialogs is a LibreOffice component used to share UI elements with Collabora Online. Hear about the most recent updates added. See details

Follow us for more insights on LibreOffice technology

Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online and is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud. Collabora provides a wide range of products, as well as consulting services for enterprises and governments. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice Technology codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS, Android, and Chrome OS. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

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Collaboran talks at the LibreOffice Conference 2021

2021-09-082021-09-22 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

An online conference all about LibreOffice technology

Hosted by The Document Foundation, the LibreOffice Conference 2021 (LibOCon) will be an online event. The live-streaming of the talks and workshops will be taking place from September 23rd to September 25th. Collabora developers will give interesting talks on LibreOffice technology, Collabora Online and the ecosystem on all three days, providing profound insights around the latest features and developments. This article gives you an overview of our presentations. Meet us at LibOCon 2021 and just one week later at our COOLdays!

Day 1: Thursday, September 23rd 2021

Michael Meeks

13:00 – 13:30 – Room 1

Collabora Keynote

Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity and member of the LibreOffice Board, looks at the latest developments around LibreOffice from an organizational and ecosystem perspective.

See details Save to calendar

Noel Grandin

15:00 – 15:30 – Room 1

I feel the need… The need for speed…

See details Save to calendar

Marco Cecchetti

16:00 – 16:20 – Room 1

Some improvements for the SVG export filter

Marco Cecchetti reports on progress around the use of SVG in presentations and the improvements in performance and storage requirements on export.

See details Save to calendar

Tomaž Vajngerl

16:30 – 17:00 – Room 1

Improved document searching with LibreOffice

Collabora developer Miklos Vajna introduces the latest enhancements to LibreOffice and Collabora Online search that visualize hits across different documents.

See details Save to calendar

Mike Kaganski

17:00 – 17:30 – Room 1

Multi-column support in LibreOffice 7.2

The new feature, its relevance, obstacles and implementation status. Mike Kaganski shares his experience, how interesting was it to work on this.

See details Save to calendar

Day 2: Friday, September 24th 2021

Cor Nouws

12:00 – 12:30 – Room 1

A year of COOL …

Find out about the improvements that LibreOffice technology in the browser experienced. Hear about success stories and new features in Collabora Online!

See details Save to calendar

Michael Meeks

12:30 – 13:00 – Room 1

COOL performance

See details Save to calendar

Sarper Akdemir

13:00 – 13:05 – Room 2

PPTX footer export & import interoperability

Sarper Akdemir outlines the challenges around the export & import of Footers in PPTX and how they have been mastered.

See details Save to calendar

Miklos Vajna

13:30 – 13:50 – Room 1

Gutter margin in Writer page styles

LibreOffice was already capable of handling various margins in Writer page styles. A missing piece was the support for the gutter margins. Find out, how this was implemented!

See details Save to calendar

Tomaž Vajngerl

14:00 – 14:30 – Room 1

Built-in “Xray” like UNO object inspector

See details Save to calendar

Tomaž Vajngerl

15:30 – 16:00 – Room 1

PDF annotations support

The LibreOffice technology in Draw is key to PDF annotations, and the support of a recently added review-based workflow. Find out, how this has been implemented!

See details Save to calendar

Day 3: Saturday, September 25th 2021

Szymon Kłos

13:00 – 13:15 – Room 1

JSDialogs improvements over the past year

JSDialogs is a LibreOffice component used to share UI elements with Collabora Online. Hear about the most recent updates added.

See details Save to calendar

More interesting talks on LibreOffice technology at the COOLdays

We’re excited to announce the COOL Days 2021 – just one week after the LibOCon. The online conference will take place on September 30th and October 1st and feature a vast range of topics around Collabora Online’s technological and commercial development. The 30th of September – Development Day – is focused on developers to share their experiences. The 1st of October – Business Day – concentrates on commercial topics. Discover the COOL Days program.

Experience COOL Days