Collabora Online Unlocks the OpenPOWER Architecture

26 October 202228 October 2022 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

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

A Business Perspective on Open Source – The Enterprise Open Source Day

4 October 20215 October 2021 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Business perspectives on Open Source

Together with our friends and partners from Factor Group, Canonical, Nextcloud, Linbit, and OpenNebula, we will be highlighting business perspectives on the use of open source in the enterprise during Enterprise Open Source Day on 10 November 2021. The summit will feature talks from leading industry leaders such as Mark Shuttleworth, Frank Karlitschek and Michael Meeks. Details of the program are available on the event page.

Open Source in large organizations

Open Source is becoming more and more important for businesses building secure collaboration platforms. Over the last years, the various platforms have matured and are as capable, and often better than proprietary solutions, to offer the scale, security and integration large organizations need.

With our partners, we are pleased to invite everyone to participate in the Enterprise Open Source Summit, a virtual event focused on transition strategies and the subsequent successful use of open-source solutions in the corporate environment.

The summit will take place on November 10, co-organized between open-source industry leaders Canonical, Nextcloud, Collabora and Factor Group as well as Linbit and OpenNebula.

Program

Each of us has years of experience with open source in finance, retail, energy, manufacturing, telecommunication, public sector and other areas. We will share our knowledge in a program of keynotes, lightning talks and demos, bringing several customers to talk about their experiences as well. Participants will be able to get answers to their questions first-hand from industry leaders.

The following questions and strategies will be discussed at the event:

Migration from deployed commercial products to open-source solutions
Commercial support for open-source solutions and related concerns (scaleability, stability, integration, vendor lock-in and more)
Security and creation of fault-tolerant solutions

Find a more complete overview of the program on this page.

Cost

Tickets for the Enterprise open-source Event are available at 150 USD. However, different early bird options are available, offering significant discount on the admission. Secure your seat at the event page.

Buy your ticket

Collabora Online Shines at the Nextcloud Conference

7 October 202016 October 2020 Cor Nouws Leave a comment

#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.

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.

Download the Slides

“Real Time, Secure Collaboration” presentation at Nextcloud Enterprise 2019!

11 April 201929 April 2019 Eloy Crespo Leave a comment

On March 12th, Nextcloud held their annual Enterprise Day in the Congress Centrum Liederhalle in the center of Stuttgart, Germany. Participants enjoyed a day of strategic sessions, presentations, learning from different enterprise case studies and best practices on the Nextcloud platform.

During the Nextcloud Enterprise Day, Collabora Productivity’s General Manager Michael Meeks gave a talk about how Collabora Online integrates into Nextcloud.

Collabora Online is an on-premise open source software component based on LibreOffice, that can be easily integrated into any web application, and which enables viewing and collaborative editing of Office documents in dozens of file formats. This provides an easy-to-deploy office suite that runs directly in any modern browser, on any device.

Slides

Check out the slides above for the complete presentation:

Download presentation in PDF (5.1 MB)

Try Collabora Online in Nextcloud

Open letter for the EU parliament about Copyright Directive

19 March 201927 March 2019 Eloy Crespo Leave a comment

As you may have heard: at the end of March, the EU parliament will have to vote on the Copyright Directive. Two articles in this directive – Articles 11 and 13 – may seriously jeopardize the success of all open source businesses and companies in Europe.

We believe that it is essential for businesses (rather than just individuals) to be heard in this debate. For this reason, many different European companies from the open source world, including Collabora, have signed an open letter to the European Parliament trying to urge politicians to vote against Articles 11 and 13 of the proposed Copyright Directive.

This open letter has been sent today (March 19th, 2019) to the members of the European Parliament. Please, find below a link where you can download and read this open letter. And, do not hesitate to share it with your contacts.

Tag: Nextcloud