Tag: release

New: Collabora Office for Android

Cor Nouws 27 Comments

Great new interface and editing – in beta

We are excited to announce a complete new version of Collabora Office for Android, available now in Google Play, with the following main improvements:

  • A great looking interface, easy to use with just one hand on your phone
  • Editing of complex office documents, not just viewing
  • Now re-uses the same technology as Collabora Online.

In common with other Collabora Productivity products, this new Android release enables people to edit their documents without compromising on privacy. There is no longer a reason to hand over your data to get rich mobile editing.
The new release marks the end of a period of rewriting important parts of the application. We now share much of the code and user experience from Collabora Online’s collaborative editor as well as Collabora Office 6.2 for displaying the documents.

(Please don’t miss the announcement of the release of February 2020!)

Get Collabora Office for Android now

 

(minimal version Android 5.0)

What it looks like

Text file and image details – Collabora Office for Android
Typing in a text document – Collabora Office for Android
Inserting and editing tables – Collabora Office for Android

More great interface details

Text file with spreadsheet embedded – Collabora Office for Android
Image handling in text document – Collabora Office for Android

A new front end, re-using Collabora Online

The technology under the hood has changed almost completely, with only the LibreOffice core for rendering the documents remained. We removed the previous Fennec tiled renderer, and moved to re-use a our Collabora Online web view. This means our Android app can share the same features as our flagship product Collabora Online. The recently released Collabora Office for iOS uses the same approach. As a result, features and improvements and fixes made foor one solution (online, mobile, desktop) often enhance all the others. The Javascript and CSS base makes contributing to and developing and debugging the app much simpler for people to get involved with.

 

Shape editing – Collabora Office for Andoid

 

Spreadsheet in Collabora Office for Android

 

Rich documents in Collabora Office for Android

 

Getting involved

Once you have got Collabora Office (Google Play), your feedback is much appreciated. Report any problems you find to the bug tracker, and attach any documents related to the issue so developers can investigate. You can also checkout the Online code and build it yourself.

Rich history and community growth

The road to the current version of the Android app was a long one, one with many companions and some detours. The first version that brought LibreOffice to the Android platform was released in 2011 after an intensive process of cross-compiling and a number of bug fixes. This version was rather a proof of concept and by no means suitable for productive work.

Two years later, in 2013, the application had developed into a document viewer rendering entire pages and including basic user interface to handle pages. During the years 2014 to 2015, the rendering was changed to split the pages into „tiles“, the same way as other applications like Mozilla Firefox were doing. We have extracted the Mozilla’s compositing from their code and reused it in our Android app – still only a viewer. Later in this period, editing was added as an experimental feature.
Between 2016 and 2018 further features and functions were implemented thanks to community involvement, however the vision of a full editor was not realized.

In 2019 we decided to do a complete rewrite of everything above the LibreOffice rendering core. Inspiration for this was the development of the new Collabora Office for iOS app, which Collabora is driving forward together with our Swiss partner Adfinis SyGroup. The current, newly developed Android app benefits greatly from the Collabora Online code base and work for the iOS version and includes also features implemented this year during the GSoC, mentored by our engineers.

Thanks to everyone that contributed

This new Office app for Android obviously came by a huge investment from Collabora. As with all open source projects, it has also been made possible by the open source community as a whole, by many organizations and the personal dedication of many individuals that contributed. Specifically, for this Android app we want to mention the initial Android port funded by SUSE. The initial app used the tiled rendering funded by CloudOn, and was driven by Smoose, IceWarp and many customers of Collabora Productivity. The Document Foundation’s donors also funded the initial basic editing functionality.

Without ever doing justice to the entire crowd of supporters, we would like to thank a few people whose performance in this development has been outstanding. At this point, we would like to mention the pioneering work of our fellow two collaborators Tor Lillqvist and Michael Meeks and on the initial version of the App that among others included a first loader developed by Iain Billiet, during his GSoC ‘12 program and other components by Matúš Kukan.

Tomaž Vajngerl contributed to the already mentioned tiled rendering to the app in 2014/2105. Miklos Vajna’s efforts made editing possible at that stage. Christian Lohmaier, Ximeng Zu, and Mert Tumer have made important and substantial contributions by adding more features to the toolbar in the last few years.

Tor Lillquist was also responsible for the development of the Collabora Office for iOS app, which had a significant influence on the version for Android, and was made possible thanks to the great personal commitment of Nicolas Christener of Adfinis SyGroup. Thank you to Kaishu Sahu for his large amount of features programmed during the GSoC this summer, while our team member Jan Holesovsky has been the main developer of the current release.

Would you like to be part of the story ? get involved today.

About Collabora Productivity:

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it 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, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the 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.

Discover and test new 4.2 features in the regular Collabora Online snapshots

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Discover and test the new Collabora Online 4.2 features in our regular snapshots!

The next big point release of Collabora Online is approaching. With version 4.2.0 we implement a lot of new features. Be among the first to experience and try them out in our latest snapshot. The quality of new software depends largely on the valuable feedback from users like you. So do you notice anything unexpected? Something does not seem to work as it should? Please be so kind and tell us about it! Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Happy testing!

Some of many new features

The 4.2.0 release of Collabora Online will include many fixes and a lot of new features in terms of design, functionality and usability. The sidebar will see major updates and improve working with documents both from desktop and mobile devices. The list of new functions is long. Here are just a few of the new features already included in the snapshot we would like to point your attention to.

Features

  • Table manipulation in sidebar

In Collabora Online 4.2 you will be able to access many of the options to manipulate tables in writer documents from a new “Table” panel in the sidebar. You are able to insert and delete columns and rows, merge and distribute cells, adjust height and width.

  • Handling of hyperlinks

Version 4.2 of Collabora Online brings nice enhancements when working with hyperlinks. Whenever the cursor is located next to or on a link, you will be notified by a dialogue. You can access the linked URL directly from that pop-up window with a single click.

  • Chart properties in the sidebar

Many chart properties can now be modified from the sidebar. The chart type and various other elements from the chart wizard can now be selected and adjusted there.

  • Quick / Bottom toolbar

The bottom toolbar has been re-designed. It does now look more appealing, features a new icon design, and enables quick access to the language selection and  zoom magnitudes.

  • Colour pickers

The colour picker has been added for various properties both in dialogs and in the sidebar.

  • Rich table of contents handling

The dialog with settings for the table of contents is available online now, giving you full control over all the important details while working online.

  • Powerful new function wizard

The powerful functions wizard now is available for spreadsheets online. Start it, fill in the arguments, investigate the formula’s structure and let the magic happen.

  • Conditional formatting

Conditional formatting online has been extended enormously. Apart from the direct menu choice, the full options of the dialog now allows you to add (almost) any formatting condition.

Start using and testing the new features

You can get a snapshot of Collabora Office and try it right now – and we love to hear your feedback. Regular updates will be released – so stay tuned!

Get & Test Snapshot

For more information

Follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter or send us an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com

Collabora Online 4.0.9 – Watermark improvements in Secure View, CentOS 8/RHEL 8 support, and more!

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Cambridge, United Kingdom, November 28, 2019 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, providing Collabora Online and other enterprise supported products, is excited to announce a new release of our product Collabora Online 4.0.9. This release comes with interesting new features and bugfixes too.

What’s new in Collabora Online 4.0.9?

Features

  • Improved watermark rendering in Secure View.
    • It is possible to override watermarks from the config file.
    • Watermarks are 45° rotated.
    • Watermarks are not displayed outside of the document area.

  • Search results are highlighted in read-only documents.

  • Action_Save now supports ExtendedData with custom contents, which is passed to the WOPI-like Host.
  • New setting to always save documents on exit and upload to the WOPI-like Host.
  • Introduced the “TemplateSource” WOPI property (for Nextcloud’s GlobalScale architecture).
  • New platform supported: CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

Bug-fixes

  • Improved stability, shutdown, and service life-cycle management.
  • Calc’s NOW() function shows the server’s local time correctly
  • Build with latest POCO C++ Libraries 1.9.4

Getting Collabora Online 4.0.9

Collabora Online is suitable for large scale deployment, comes with an SLA, Long Term Support with signed security updates as well as a rich product management interaction helping to direct our development priorities.

Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out more information on partner integrations and online demos. For tailored solutions, contact sales@collaboraoffice.com.

Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner by filling in the partner form or contacting sales@collaboraoffice.com.

Collabora Online is only one part of a larger Enterprise File Sync & Share, Groupware, or Hosting solution. Collabora is excited to go to market with a long list of Partners each of which has an integration and provides you with useful support.

Online demo

You also can get an online demo of Collabora Online and try it out yourself right now!

Try the Online Demo

For more information:

About Collabora Productivity:

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it 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, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the 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.

Collabora Office available as first free open source office app for iOS

Cor Nouws 5 Comments

Effort by Adfinis SyGroup and Collabora bringing open source office to the world of Apple iOS and iPad

For the first time there is a free / open source office suite available on iOS: Collabora Office, thanks to the efforts led by Adfinis SyGroup and Collabora. What started back in around 1992 as the well-known StarOffice, then was OpenOffice.org and now lives on as LibreOffice, is finally available on every relevant platform including (but not limited to) iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Android1, Chrome OS, Windows, Linux and also in the browser.

There is a lot we want to tell you about this first open source office app for iOS. In this blog we write a bit more on the technical part; the blog at Adfinis, has more focus on the interesting history.
But let us first show how it looks!

Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.
Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.
Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS
Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS

 

Composing texts in Collabora Office iOS.
Composing texts in Collabora Office iOS.

 

Get Collabora Office on iOS from the App Store

There are currently two possible ways to get the app:

  1. Download Testflight through the Apple Store and use this link to join:
    This will give you the latest releases – which are not fully tested, and available to just try and test

  2. Download the app through the Apple Store.

Over the past months, more than 60 versions have been released and the number of improvements and enhancements is for more than a hundred!

Built with online innovation

Collabora Online is built on technological innovation. And on a rich history, starting more than 30 years ago by StarOffice, following OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. We suggest you to read the blog post at Adfinis with interesting details. The innovative part was already mentioned in our first blog post. Collabora Office for iOS is built on the technology that was developed by Collabora to bring LibreOffice to the cloud. An important part of this technology is called LibreOfficeKit. This is a layer allowing to use the LibreOffice we all know on the server side and from there publish documents in the browser. And since LibreOffice is capable of opening the largest possible set of documents, Collabora Online has the same capability in nearly every modern browser!

And there is more that is interesting: the document on the screen is published as tiled images, which means that it doesn’t leave the server, which is especially useful for working online securely. The UI itself, for different platforms, is build with HTML/JS, on top off the VCL, the LibreOffice Visual Class Library. This enables the Collabora app to use many elements of the extensive functionality of LibreOffice’s UI.

A really nice advantage of this approach is that we cover three major scenarios with essentially this one solution:

  • Online — see e. g. Collabora Online

  • iOS — what we are presenting you now

  • Android — work in progress, available through the Android Beta channel

This means that future improvements that are implemented for one platform will also benefit the other implementations.

Native look and feel & finger usage

Apple has put a lot of effort into creating great UX guidelines and great GUI widgets for iOS. However, VCL (the GUI toolkit used within the LibreOffice core) was born long before iOS and it doesn’t look and behave like a native iOS app. And even though development took the path of LibreOffice online, a lot of effort was needed in order to make VCL look, feel and behave more like an actual iOS app.

The sidebar makes settings easily accessible

A very important feature to make the app easier to use, is the sidebar. The sidebar contains contextual features and makes good use of the wide screens of the iPads.

Working with tables in text documents.
Working with tables in text documents.

 

Including pictures in Writer documents
Including pictures in Writer documents

 

Selection of cells in a spreadsheet
Selection of cells in a spreadsheet

 

Finger sized resize and rotate handles

Many tasks can be done with the fingers: resizing or rotating an image, change the size of a row or column in a table, etc.

The whole team has put a lot of effort in developing and testing those things work. And honestly we think that the result is quite nice.

Integrating iOS spellchecker

iOS offers spell checking as part of the basic system functionality. We integrated this functionality into the app. So now Collabora Office on iOS nicely uses the system spell checker in order to eliminate misspelled words!

Spell checking in Collabora Office on iOS
Spell checking in Collabora Office on iOS

GUI widgets in iOS style

Drop down menus and check boxes have their own style in Apple iOS and so we make the widget in Collabora look similar as much as possible. The result is nice and we’ll try to improve even further. This thanks to the work of for example Collabora developers Szymon Kłos, who wrote a blog post2 about the work of using native widgets in the future, and Tomaž Vajngerl, who gave a presentation about Custom Widget Themes during the LibreOffice Conference 20193 in Almeria.

Rich features in user interface
Rich features in user interface

 

Handles to select text in iOS style

The text handles look like those of a current iOS app. Currently they behave a bit differently and we work on improving this. That however turns out to be far from trivial.

Selection handles in Collabora on iOS
Selection handles in Collabora on iOS

Inserting pictures through the iOS camera / image gallery

Inserting pictures behaves like in any other app. You can either take a picture with the device camera or select one from your image gallery.

How this helps LibreOffice on Android

As already described above, Collabora leads the effort to use the same approach we use in the iOS app to deliver a new Android app.
During GSOC 2019 Kaishu Sahu did a great job and improved the Android app a lot. Jan Holesovsky (Collabora) is working to improve the situation even further and we should see a public release not too far in the future.
If you’re interested to learn more about the Android efforts or how to join, please contact Collabora.

What’s next for Collabora Office?

While we all work on further improvements, we there are very good reasons to be happy with what has been achieved so far 😉 And of course the good news is that you can experience that yourself.

For the near future, we already have the following things in mind:

  • Create shiny templates

  • Implement native widgets / improve UX

  • Reduce latency

  • Better support hardware keyboards (and shortcuts)

  • Fix more rough edges

  • Make more core features accessible (math formulas, image cropping, …)

  • Reduce number of needed clicks for simple things (change cell background in a writer table, change text wrap of a picture, …)

Note that these points may change — this list is not a road map!

It’s your turn: you can help to make this better!

If you plan to use LibreOffice in an enterprise environment, whether on the desktop, on Android or on an iPad, we strongly recommend the enterprise ready version offered by Collabora. You’ll enjoy the advantages of an SLA, long-term support and last but not least it is a very good way to enhance the development of things like this iOS app!

Let’s be frank: money is very helpful to further speed up the development. So, if your organization plans to use LibreOffice on iOS (or any other platform) we’re happy to get you on board! Please don’t hesitate to contact Adfinis directly or Collabora Productivity to discuss possible ways to support the development.

Some words of thanks

This fantastic work would not be possible without the strong support and investment of Collabora and Adfinis SyGroup pays. Thanks to the entire crew that works hard every day to provide more free / open source solutions to the people out there!

 

(1 The Android App is still in Beta. The release is expected later this quarter.

2 http://eszkadev.blogspot.com/2019/09/native-widgets-on-mobile-for-online.html

3 https://conference.libreoffice.org/2019 )

 

 

For more information

Follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter or send us an email to hello@collaboraoffice.com

Collabora Online 4.0.8 – Debian 10 support, Secure Watermarking, faster scrolling .. and more!

Cor Nouws Leave a comment

Cambridge, United Kingdom, October 24, 2019 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, Providing Collabora Online and other enterprise supported products, is excited to announce a new release of our product Collabora Online 4.0.8. This release comes with interesting new features and bugfixes too.

What’s new in Collabora Online 4.0.8?

Features

  • Packages for Debian 10.
  • The order of slides can now be changed via drag-and-drop.
  • Scrolling in Calc  is much faster.
  • With secure collaboration there is a different watermarks for each user.
Watermark view Collabora Online
With secure view Collabora Online can give each user it’s own watermark
  • Improved startup → less flicker, hide progress-bar for ~2-3 seconds.
  • A new setting to force that when a document is closed, it is always upload to storage, also when it’s not changed.
    For this there is the new setting per_document.always_save_on_exit.
  • The dimming when a document is not actively in use, is much more relaxed. About 4 times slower.

Bug-fixes

  • Occasional erroneous limits popup is now gone.
  • Font size list behaved wrong, not showing fonts in some situations.

Getting Collabora Online 4.0.8

Collabora Online is suitable for large scale deployment, comes with an SLA, Long Term Support with signed security updates as well as a rich product management interaction helping to direct our development priorities.

Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out more information on partner integrations and online demos. For tailored solutions, contact sales@collaboraoffice.com.

Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner by filling in the partner form or contacting sales@collaboraoffice.com.

Collabora Online is only one part of a larger Enterprise File Sync & Share, Groupware, or Hosting solution. Collabora is excited to go to market with a long list of Partners each of which has an integration and provides you with useful support.

Online demo

You also can get an online demo of Collabora Online and try it out yourself right now!

Try the Online Demo

For more information:

About Collabora Productivity:

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it 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, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the 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.