Talks and Slides by Collabora at FOSDEM 2022

14 February 202214 February 2022 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

FOSDEM 2022 – The Talks and Slides from the Collabora Team

Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like the last two years, FOSDEM is and remains the largest and most important gathering of Open-Source developers in Europe. We’d like to express our gratitude to the community and the organisers. The Collabora team gave numerous talks in the LibreOffice Technology devroom. Missed a presentation? Below you will find links to all videos and to the downloads of the slides.

Gülşah Köse

LibreOffice Technology devroom

OOXML Document Analysis

Collabora developer Gülşah Köse explains how we respond when we receive a problematic OOXML document from a customer and demonstrates the solution to a sample bug. See details

Miklos Vajna

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. See details

Gökay Şatır

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Canvas For Rendering UX

Gökay Şatır shows why we chose to use Canvas for rendering the UI and the document, and explains the structure we created to execute this task. See details

Mert Tümer

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. See details

Jan Holesovsky

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 talks about these recent developments See details

Follow Collabora Office on YouTube

Michael Meeks

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. Watch Michael Meeks talk about how Online performance wins are making browser-based collaborative editing quicker. See details

Szymon Kłos

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. Watch Szymon Kłos‘ talk for a brief summary of what has already been done and how it works. See details

Pranam Lashkari

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. See details

Ashod Nakashian

16:00 – 16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Collabora Online: Async-Saving Design and Testing

This talk explores 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 covers both the design and the challenges of testing a highly critical component of a production product.

See details Join video & conversation

Henry Castro

LibreOffice Technology devroom

Macro Dialog Feature

Watch Henry Castro‘s talk on the implementation of a Macro Selector Dialog on the client side to execute VBA macros on the server side. See details

Try the Collabora Online demo

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.

Homeworking and the Role of Open Software in 2022

27 January 202227 January 2022 Richard Brock Leave a comment

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 at FOSDEM 2022

26 January 20224 February 2022 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.

See details Join video & conversation

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.

See details Join video & conversation

Miklos Vajna

16:00 – 16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Document Themes in LibreOffice Impress and Elsewhere

See details Join video & conversation

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.

See details Join video & conversation

Access your free Collabora Online demo

Day 2: Sunday, February 6th 2022

Mert Tümer

12:00 – 12:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

Editing Simulation

See details Join video & conversation

Jan Holesovsky

13:00 – 13:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom

LibreOfficeKit Recent Developments

See details Join video & conversation

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.

See details Join video & conversation

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.

See details Join video & conversation

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.

See details Join video & conversation

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.

See details Join video & conversation

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.

See details Join video & conversation

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 Office 6.4 Released

4 August 202021 May 2021 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Cambridge, August 4th, 2020 – Today we release Collabora Office 6.4 providing businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and custom support in open source while respecting user privacy and company data security. Changes in Collabora Office 6.4 also support new and enhanced features in Collabora Online.

Excellent Interoperability and World Class Support

Collabora Office 6.4 offers excellent interoperability with all major office formats. Import text documents, spreadsheets and presentations from MS Office files or the Open Document Format and save them just as easily. We maintain the world’s largest team of certified LibreOffice developers and offer our customers a long-term supported version of LibreOffice. Version branch 6.4 of Collabora Office will be supported until August 2023 at least.

New Features in Version 6.4

In addition to improving performance and interoperability, Collabora Office 6.4 brings a number of practical improvements to your work. The newly implemented functions can be found all over the suite. The following are some outstanding examples.

Adding Visible Signatures to Existing PDF Files

Collabora Office already had the capability to add a digital signature to an existing PDF file. This still works the same. That signature however is (and was) only visible on the status bar and in file properties; there is no visible signature in the PDF file. Now in Collabora Office 6.4 adding a visible signature has been made possible. You start this new feature by selecting the PDF file with File > Digital Signatures > Sign existing PDF.

Addding visible signatures to existing PDF files — Ad visible signatures to existing PDF files

Read all details in this blog post.

Send Encrypted PDF Files with Mail Merge

One of the very handy and well established features of Collabora Office Writer, is Mail Merge that directly sends out PDF files. In version 6.4 this function has been extended so that you now can send encrypted PDF files. This enhances the privacy options of your workflow. Find more details in our blog.

Encrypt your PDF when sending them with Mail Merge

Padded Numbering Up to 5 Characters

Padded Numbering allows you to work with list numbering using a prefix. This is now possible up to four zeros. The feature that was introduced in an earlier version was limited to prefixes of two zeros.

A Padded Numbering list with a prefix of two zeros in Writer

Set Distance of Shapes to the Bottom of the Page

It can be very handy to specify the vertical position of a shape in text documents by setting the distance at the bottom of the page content area. Until now, this was not possible, although you can do so with the distance at the top of the page content area. If you tried to do the same from the bottom, the shape would be pushed below the margin. Collabora Office 6.4 now fixes this. You can set a negative value for the position to the bottom of the page content area, and the shape will stay in that position. Also when for example the page size is changed, or when other content is added or moved. More details are described in this blog.

Export Larger Pages from Draw using PDF 1.6

Using PDF 1.6, exported PDFs can now be larger than 508 cm (200 inch). Before the size was limited because of the possibilities of the PDF 1.5 specification. Since PDF files from Collabora Office, or more specifically from Draw, can be used to create banners, a limitation of 5 meters only is of course, impractical. More background on this can be found in this blog.

Semi-transparent Text in Writer

Collabora Office 6.4 supports semi-transparent text, as it is also supported by Microsoft Word for DOCX files. So this again represents an interoperability improvement. In this blog you can find more details.

Upstream LibreOffice and more…

Collabora Office is based on the stable LibreOffice branch with extra features and fixes. Collabora Office 6.4 has the capabilities as described in the LibreOffice 6.4 release notes, of which quite some, especially these for our customers, have been introduced in earlier versions of Collabora Office. Of the 6.4 features, quite some have been added by our Collabora Productivity team. As an outstanding example, we feature the Full PDF Export for Spreadsheets.

Full-Sheet Previews option on the PDF Export Dialog

Updates & Security advisories

News on all 6.4-updates are in the release notes. And for security updates, pls check this page.

About

Collabora Office is the LibreOffice-technology based suite for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 6.4 provides businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and L3 support.
Collabora is privileged to work with so many great contributors to the LibreOffice project and appreciates all the amazing work done by so many that is also included into Collabora Office 6.4. This, our annual release, contains much work that was contributed to LibreOffice 6.3 and then LibreOffice 6.4. These cover all manner of areas from significantly improved filters, performance improvements, 95+% of online features and improvements, rendering along with a powerful redaction feature.
Please do find the full credits here.

Migrate with our demo of Collabora Office 6.4

You can try Collabora Office 6.4 yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or just click the button below.

Try the Demo

Collabora Office 6.2

20 December 201911 January 2020 Marc Rodrigues 5 Comments

Cambridge, December 20, 2019 – Today we release Collabora Office 6.2.0 providing businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and custom support in open source as well as respecting user privacy and company data security. Changes in Collabora Office 6.2 also support new and enhanced features in Collabora Online.

The Best of Features, Interoperability, and Support in Open Source

We’ve selected the following of the new possibilities and improvements, available in the new release of our office productivity suite.

Writer 6.2

Better language support and exchange with Word documents including support for bottom-top left-right text direction.
Extended support of the legacy type Microsoft form fields.

Table-size actions involving column/row size now behave more in line with expectations.
HTML export has an opt-in mode to write the ReqIF subset of XHTML.

Calc 6.2

The new feature full sheet preview for PDF export gives a good overview of all the content of the spreadsheet.

Copy & paste of spreadsheet data directly in text document tables.
Data Validation now supports custom formula.
Multivariate regression analysis is possible using the regression tool (Data ▸ Statistics ▸ Regression).

Also, many more statistical measures are now available in the analysis output.

Impress/Draw 6.2

A whole series of improvements in animations.
In Draw the attributes to display and protect layers, are now compliant with ODF specifications.
Many layer improvements.
There is now a Table sub menu to menu Format.

Miscellaneous 6.2

The Help is improved, nice looking and completely available online, making finding information on many topics easy and fast.

Redaction feature, with automated finding of targets, to remove sensitive content before sharing documents.

The new Print dialog makes handling all print tasks easier.

Encryption improvements for OOXML-documents.
Signature Lines can be used in combination with (a signature) image and are now available in Calc too.

Integration, business

Improvements in COLEAT, for integration with business applications written in Microsoft Office Visual Basic.

File locking in mixed environments with Microsoft documents improved.
Better integration with SharePoint 2010 via ActiveX.

Series interoperability improvements

Much improved displaying of SmartArt import from PPTX.

Microsoft OOXML charts.
There are many improvements in interoperability, of which quite some may look as minor, but that all together make a real difference.

User interface

There is a rich choice in toolbar layouts – a solution for every need and each preference via menu View > User Interface.

Nice and clear new icon sets.

Mobile improvements 6.2

We only mention a few items here: better support for HiDPI displays, improved performance, enhanced Document signing with Verisign.
Most important are a huge amount of improvements that show in better integration on small devices, more powerful features online, better look and user-friendliness. We recommend our information on Android, Apple iOS and CODE 4.2.0 (showing what will be in Collabora Online).

About

Collabora Office 6.2 provides businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and L3 support. Based on upstream LibreOffice 6.2 source code, the project in which we are happy to cooperate and where all our code is contributed, and extended with improvements and backported stable features from newer releases, or features for our customers that are not yet available in the stable upstream branches.

Migrate with our demo of Collabora Office 6.2

You can try Collabora Office 6.2 yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or just click the button below.

Try the Demo