Integrate Collabora Online

Empower your users with powerful document editing capabilities, easily integrated into your existing platform.

Usability optimisation

We offer 2 different on-premise products:

Collabora Office (desktop) is the enterprise-ready edition of the world’s most widely used Open Source desktop office suite. We provide installation and administration utilities together with long term maintenance and contracted support to deliver successful deployments with expertise.

Collabora Online – Collaborative editing in the cloud, on your own terms.

For Enterprises that want a powerful office suite in the cloud, or on-premise, that protects their privacy and allows them to keep full control of their sensitive corporate data.
For Hosting and Cloud businesses who wish to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offering.

There is also a comparison document between both products in our “white papers and case studies page” called “What are the differences between Collabora Online and Collabora Office?“

Visualizing and Hiding Latency

We offer our free version CODE. CODE is a continuously updated, rolling release where we try out our latest feature work, and has no SLA or long term support. As such, we don’t recommend CODE for business or production environments.

If you are familiar with Linux, then CODE would be like our Fedora or openSUSE version – rather than RHEL or SLES, and lots of people use it.

More information here: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

Asynchronosity

CODE is the development version of Collabora Online, used primarily for testing. Most of the core functionality will be identical between the two, and in many cases CODE will have more up-to-date functionality than Collabora Online even, but since it is a testing environment, it is not recommended for anyone who needs a stable supported release. It is perfect for testing, home use or small teams, but not recommended for a production environments.

Collabora Online is our enterprise-ready, supported version which is available as a subscription plan based on the number of users per year. This comes with SLA, maintenance, Long term support, software and security updates and much more.

Security Examples

Our subscriptions are based on a yearly price with discounts available for multi-year contracts. Please contact us to discuss details.

Security Process

For Collabora Online, a user is someone who has access to use the supported and maintained software. So everyone who has an account to create, edit and collaborate on documents. An important advantage of our approach is, that we don’t charge you for the number of documents that users have open in the browser simultaneously. Another advantage is that users can also share documents with others who have no account, to co-edit or review. We do not charge for external users.

You can access Collabora Online via one of our partners or by integrating it into your own environment.

There is no formal limit here. Ultimately performance tails off as more users are in-use concurrently, as you might expect – depending on server resources – it is normal to have 20 people in a collaborative meeting session, which works well however.

Our sdk explains how to customise Collabora Online to fit your working environment, including how to change the theming to create a branded experience for your users, among other useful documentation to deepen your integration. You’ll also find installation guides, troubleshooting and step-by-step tutorials. https://sdk.collaboraonline.com/docs/theming.html

Deploying COOL on a Large Scale

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Kubernetes Operator

Applications can categorised into two types:
- Stateless Applications – microservices apps
- Stateful Applications – all the databases
In Stateful Applications, prior request history impacts the current state; hence, the server must access and hold onto state information generated during the processing of the earlier request
For Collabora Online, the first request to open document can end up on any pod but after that for collaborative editing work, all the requests related to that document need to be on the same pod i.e. Collabora Online is Stateful Application
Operator will make sure all the request for the same document ends up in same pod
There are two main component
- Controller
- HTTP Server

Controller

It is a control loops that watch the state of the cluster
In this case, continuously watch for any changes to the deployment object of Collabora Online
If there are any changes to the deployment (for example – scaling up or down). It creates/updates map ServerId ↔ RouteToken
- ServerId – Id of the Collabora Online Pod
- RouteToken – It is a random token. Based on this HAproxy Ingress Controller will decide to which pod the request will go

HTTP Server

There is a request from the client side (browser) every-time the document is open to the HTTP server for full URI with additional RouteToken parameter
It selects the pod with least load and based on serverId fetches the RouteToken from the ServerId ↔ RouteToken map
Client opens up the websocket using this URI, As it includes the RouteToken parameter. HAproxy decides which pod the request should end up in
Every time client constructs a URI to communicate with a pod it will add RouteToken parameter in that URI for example copy paste
There is also a websocket connection between the http server and pod which gives the server information about which documents are getting closed and loaded on each pod
It also creates/maintains a map of WOPISrc ↔ RouteToken
- When a new document opens, server gets the request for full URI with RouteToken parameter, it adds a new entry to this map
- Based on this map collaborative editing works correctly as all the request for same WOPISrc will get same RouteToken value in URI which will lead to same pod
- It also deletes the entry from map when it gets message from the admin socket of the pod if document gets closed

Setup

For more information on using Collabora Online with Kubernetes, please view our sdk here

Where / how do I file a bug?

Forum: https://forum.collaboraonline.com/

How can I get free support?

Forum: https://forum.collaboraonline.com/

How can I contribute to Collabora Online?

https://collaboraonline.github.io/

How do I start out with creating my own version of Collabora Online?

Check out the starting points for new developers on the project — usually with code pointers helping you to locate the area to hack on easily.

https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/easyhacks/

Who can benefit from using Collabora Online?

Our target are companies that look for a secure online office suite, which they can host themselves, in their desired solution, on a private or public cloud, without any vendor lock-in. The biggest issue for most companies to not use Office 365 or Google Docs is that they have to store the data on their servers – servers they don’t control and don’t know who are being shared with. In certain industries, like Pharmaceutical / Medical, Health or Finance / Banking / Insurance / Legal and/or Military this is crucial.