Collabora Online Partners with Exzatech

Cambridge, United Kingdom – Bangalore, India – 01 November 2022

Collabora, the developers behind Collabora Online, and Exzatech Consulting, an IT and software solution provider focusing on security and enhanced business performance, are happy to announce a partnership integrating Collabora Online and Exzatech’s ‘Ndryve’ collaborative workspace.

We are pleased to be Partnering with Exzatech and increasing our offering in Asia.” said Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity. “We love to work with Partners who place value in providing businesses with data privacy and have a great vision for their technology.”

Collabora Online now available in Ndryve

Exzatech provides Ndryve, an enterprise-ready, remote-friendly, “Content Collaboration Workspace” with a focus on data protection and security. Providing a range of benefits for all types of businesses including Government and Healthcare, Ndryve also hosts unique features for research and academic institutions.

Ndryve offers traditional on-premises, hybrid managed or fully cloud-hosted content collaboration workspaces. Their technology combines the ease of consumer-grade solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive, with the security, privacy and control of individual business’ needs.

Collabora Online is a powerful online office suite that supports all major document, spreadsheet and presentation file formats which can be easily integrated in many infrastructures and solutions. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file format support.

Collabora Online is excellent for enterprises that need a powerful office suite in the cloud, or on-premises, that protects their privacy and allows them to keep full control of their sensitive corporate data. Collabora Online enables Hosting and Cloud businesses to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offerings.

“We are happy to now be offering Collabora Online as an integration in Ndryve, giving our customers the ability to integrate a full-featured, flexible, collaborative workspace across desktop and mobile.” says Anantha Raghava, Chief Executive Officer of Exzatech Consulting.

About Exzatech Consulting

Exzatech combines flexibility and creativity to provide strategic guidance and innovative solutions to their clients. Their vendor-agnostic approach gives them the ability to provide the most suitable analysis, advice, and solutions for each business. Over the years, they have deployed adaptable and innovative solutions for a number of leading BFSI, government, and enterprise clients that have improved operations, secured networks, saved costs, and enhanced business performance.

“As individuals, we are just like anyone else. But as a team, we are a powerhouse of knowledge, skills, and ideas. With decades’ worth of business and technology experience under our wings, we have built a formidable presence as a much sought after IT and software solution provider in India and abroad.” says Exzatech.

For more information visit www.exzatechconsulting.com/ndryve

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online, an online office suite based on LibreOffice Technology. 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 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 and Android. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

Free Collabora Online Demo

Collabora Online Unlocks the OpenPOWER Architecture

Cambridge, October 26, 2022. Collabora Productivity announces the availability of Collabora Online in the OpenPOWER architecture. Accessing this architecture makes our collaborative online office available on another group of powerful data centres and is the result of the young partnership with independent IT service provider 21unity, based in Dieburg, Germany.

Collabora Online Available on OpenPOWER

Starting with the release of the enterprise version 22.05.6, Collabora Online now supports the ppc64le architecture. The abbreviation describes the little-endian architecture provided by the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is based on the Power ISA instruction set. Power ISA is a successor to the PowerPC ISA developed by IBM for the microprocessor architecture of the corresponding name. The architecture is super-scalable and belongs to the family of Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC).

We are pleased to bring our product to the Power platform”, says Michael Meeks, General Manager, Collabora Productivity. “We love to work with like-minded partners who build their business around open technologies.”

Benefits of the OpenPOWER Architecture

Unlocking the OpenPOWER architecture is a consistent step in our strategy to make Collabora Online available on all modern architectures and platforms while bearing the best possible performance in mind. It enables us to deliver our collaborative online office on an additional family of servers and data centres. The OpenPOWER architecture combines performance with high reliability. The openness of the technology is the key to the recent innovations in performance and energy efficiency. For the ppc64le platform, Collabora currently provides Ubuntu 20.04 packages and Docker images to customers and Partners.

21unity and Collabora Productivity Forge a Partnership

The availability of Collabora Online on the OpenPOWER architecture is the result of the fruitful partnership between the Dieburg-based IT service provider 21unity and Collabora Productivity, and was facilitated by the openness of the technology used. The OpenPower Foundation follows an open collaboration model for its technology, in which participating companies share technological innovations with each other – comparable to Collabora’s open-source software development. Collabora Online is based on LibreOffice technology – new features and enhancements that our developers create for our desktop suite are incorporated into the LibreOffice core alongside Collabora Online. 21unity offers the digitally sovereign online collaboration solution 21unity CLOUD as a new product on the OpenPOWER architecture. The offering consists of Nextcloud Enterprise for sharing files, writing email, and conducting chats and video conferences, and includes Collabora Online as a feature-rich, professional online office with outstanding interoperability.

We are very pleased to be offering Collabora Online in our 21unity Cloud running on OpenPOWER”, says Yogi M. Schneider, CTO/CDO at 21unity. “It’s great to be able to offer the excellent features and interoperability to a wider user base.”

21unity operates the 21unity CLOUD from its own data centre with enterprise-class POWERServers in Dieburg, Germany.

About 21unity

21unity, based in Dieburg, specializes in customized IT solutions for companies. They are a cloud service provider and offer an “out-of-the-box” Nextcloud Enterprise with 21unity Collaboration Cloud and also created their own ERP system, which give the customers a full-fledged digital office experience. Their mission is to create easy-to-use, browser-based solutions for uncomplicated digital collaboration. In the area of system integration, they consider themselves not just a solution finder or developer, but an accelerator and trusted partner for digital transformation. The cloud offering provides a comprehensive collaboration office with the security of a German server location. The link with 21pro – a proprietary ERP – professionalizes the workflow in the process. Learn more at 21unitycloud.de

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online, an online office suite based on LibreOffice Technology. 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 codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

 

Free Collabora Online Demo

 

Homeworking and the Role of Open Software in 2022


As most will agree, it’s been an unusual two years as the Covid pandemic has transformed society and ushered in new approaches and attitudes to the way we work, such as homeworking.

Impact of the Pandemic and Homeworking

In this blog we talk to Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity, to get his take on the business impact of the pandemic, the rise in homeworking and the ongoing pressure on organisations to enable and support effective distributed team collaboration and secure data sharing.

Discussing how the pandemic directly impacted Collabora Online, Michael explained that Collabora had always been a very virtual business so homeworking was nothing new.

“We utilise the skills and expertise of people from around the world, so distributed working is a necessity for us. Similarly, from a sales perspective, the pandemic, fortunately, has not been disruptive as it has for many other businesses. In fact, our sales over the last two years have increased significantly, which is possibly a direct result of organisations needing to respond to homeworking.”

Michael explained that they’d seen a growing number of businesses turning to Collabora Online as a way of solving urgent operational gaps brought about by the closure of offices.

“For many organisations, simply extending office-based solutions into the homes of their staff was either too expensive or technically too difficult.”

Tried and Tested Collaboration Solution

Collabora Online presented a tried and tested alternative to the commonly used office document solutions. Not only did it offer a familiar ‘desktop’ look and feel, which is important when trying to maintain productivity levels, but it was easy to deploy within a web/browser-based distributed environment, so it answered many of the issues business decision makers were asking when extending the working environment into a less-controllable domestic setting.

Michael said:

“We regularly talked with decision makers who recognised the urgency of homeworking, but were, understandably, concerned about operational implications, such as productivity, data security and legislative compliance.” He continued: “Given the way Collabora Online is built on the LibraOffice common core, we could provide a feature-rich, distributed office document collaboration solution that was tried and tested, and already optimised for the demands of the homeworking environment.”

Throughout the pandemic, and beyond, Collabora Online was, and is, being used by serious, tech-savvy organisations that need a document collaboration solution that not only provides more control over every aspect of its operation, such as the servers and networking it is hosted on, but greater security over the, often sensitive, data exchanged and stored in office documents.

Collabora Online, Office Productivity Market and Open Software in 2022

So as we move towards greater levels of ‘normality’ what does 2022 look like for Collabora Online, the office productivity market and open software in general?

“I think homeworking is here to stay,” suggested Michael.

“This long-term transition has clearly been accelerated by the pandemic, but you could argue that as the search continued for a better work/life balance, it would have come about sooner or later. As such, more and more organisations will be looking for solutions, such as Collabora Online, that are already optimised for a distributed working environment. Homeworking can come with its own challenges, especially when problems arise. In these circumstances, businesses need to be confident they can quickly and easily get the support they need, when they need it, which they can from us at Collabora.”

With regards to the open software market, Michael was very positive:

“Open Source software is everywhere now and is dominant in new product development, and although a tension can occur with commercial drivers that sometimes encourage bad practices, such as a reluctance to contribute back to the overall open software community, most of those involved get it and understand the huge benefits working with Open Source can deliver”

So 2022 looks like an exciting year for Collabora Online as it continues to respond to the evolving needs of a distributed, increasingly security-aware market, with end users keen to protect their flexibility and avoid getting tied to one dominant supplier.

Collabora Online Shines at the Nextcloud Conference

#nextcloudconf2020

 

The Nextcloud Conference 2020 took place on October 3rd and 4th – typically for this year as a virtual event. Participants were able to follow the compact presentations in the livestream and then ask questions to the speakers online. On behalf of Collabora Michael Meeks spoke about all the latest developments for Collabora Online.

Watch Michael Meeks Talk at the Nextcloud Conference 2020

Showing some highlights

Documents always stay on your server, and on your server alone

Data security is one of the top features of Collabora Online. The application lets the edited document never leave the server; only images of the documents, pixels, are transmitted to the viewing and editing parties. This differs from other approaches for online cooperation and editing, where centralized keys or even the sending and receiving of the actual file at all devices are used. On top of that, the use of watermarks make the handling of the content of your documents even more secure.

New UI – Experience options

An absolute novelty is the new user interface, which was presented only a few days before in Collabora Online Development Edition release 6.4. The new intuitive NotebookBar arranges the most important functions in clearly arranged tabs, and can also be folded up to maximize the workspace. The user interfaces can be selected in the admin area. For Nextcloud users, the classic toolbar is currently the default setting.

Collaborating with annotations to PDF files

Collabora Online offers more features for PDF files. When a PDF is opened in Collabora Online, from the three dots menu of the file, users can now search the text and also add annotations. Allowing easier cooperation on PDF documents.

Questions from the Nextcloud Community

After the streaming of the talk viewers of the Nextcloud conference had the possibility to address questions to Michael Meeks. We give you the (slightly shortened) answers below with timecoded links to the full answer in the recording of the stream.
Michael Meeks answering questions from the Nextcloud community

How to you get the new NotebookBar?

There are two answers to that. We are working on putting a UI into Nextcloud to make that extremely trivial through a check button so that it will become really easy for people to check on it, play with it and see if they like it. This is to be incorporated soon with the stable release. Currently, you can edit your loolwsd.xml file – soon to be renamed into coolwsd.xml. You’ll find the UI settings in there. All the details are available in the announcement post of Collabora Online Development Edition 6.4. (watch full answer)

Can you use custom colour pallets and corporate design colours in documents?

In terms of documents, we have a very powerful style engine in the ODF file format to create all kind of elements in different colours. You can drop that into a template and use it in Nextcloud right today. In terms of UI colours it is quite an easy thing to push elements into the iframe. We invite people to get involved on GitHub & Telegram and play around we can help you extend the range of what is possible there. (watch full answer)

When will CODE 6.4 turn into an enterprise version?

That depends on the feedback. We want to make sure that it is really ready and fully baked. I’m seeing Collabora Online 6.4 released in a matter of 3 to 4 weeks. (watch full answer)

Thanks!

We’d like to thank the Nextcloud team for the invite and the community for the awesome work it is doing in the project. Since Nextcloud Hub 19 there is an easy to install built-in server option available in Nextcloud. Of course, you can also check on the quick try-out with docker. Fancy a closer look at the slides? Please find the download link below.