Michael Meeks

Let’s kick the developers out!

In an exciting episode of the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided that in order to grow the community and accelerate its mission – it would be fitting to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. For TDF to eject so many, based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association, with seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity – brings a whole new meaning to meritocracy. This genius five-dimensional chess move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code). As well as those who created and shaped TDF initially this also impacts over thirty Collabora staff members, who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years.

Contriving a mess

In recent times several refreshingly non-conventional ‘strategic’ approaches have been pioneered: such as stacking the TDF board with non-technical, affiliated staff while at the same time accusing others of historic conflicts of interest; overriding past board and engineering steering committee decisions and violating their own processes to drag code out of the attic to enable competing with their largest single contributor. This last apparently with no clear technical plan beyond “to start a discussion”. Novel TDF schemes that we’ve tried to discourage have been: spending donors’ money to take legal action against blameless, volunteer, ex-board members for seemingly contrived reasons, or threatening those that contribute to the project for using the normally free to use LibreOffice trademark under license, while ignoring the widespread misuse of the mark by unlicensed non-contributors.

Another innovation has been a new tendering policy: voted through full of regression bugs and FIXMEs, or perhaps TDF incredibly not paying for tendered code under contracts that had been delivered (oh and meanwhile selling that in app-stores), or perhaps delaying and overturning elections after they are run, or dramatic changes to TDF’s bylaws by a rump-board. Or a different scheme – ejecting conference organizers Gabriel Massei and Gabor Kelemen for similarly nonsensical reasons, the latter in mid-organization of the annual conference – who nobly continued to deliver that. We could spend a week enumerating the contributions of those unfairly removed, how about Andras Timar who was responsible for creating our translation infrastructure, but let’s not get too deeply into this deep well of tangled incoherence; so where is the good news

Sense & sensibility

Our team at Collabora is dedicated to making Open Source Rock: restoring Digital Sovereignty to our users. Many of us helped to create LibreOffice before TDF even existed, and we plan to continue our mission. If for now we can climb out of this pit of directionless political grievance – that is a relief, and we have a clear plan. If, like us, you too love to work on making great Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS), and like a sensible place to do it please do come work with us on what is still by far the best FLOSS Office code-base in the world – with a bright future ahead of it.

We are of course really grateful to an amazing legacy of code from StarDivision, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, SUSE, RedHat and so many others who have contributed in the wider community and to our many photogenic supporters for their support. We are also deeply grateful to our partners and customers for funding everything we do.

Outside of the TDF ‘strategy’ bubble – I would also like to acknowledge all the good and decent TDF staff with real experience of FLOSS projects that we have collaborated with around the code for many years very happily to do amazing things: we respect your service, competence and commitment.

What’s next ?

We have bold and ongoing plans to create an entirely new, cut-down, differentiated Collabora Office for users that is smoother, more user friendly, and less feature dense than our Classic product (which will continue to be supported for years for our partners). This gives a chance to innovate faster in a separate place on a smaller, more focused code-base with fewer build configurations, much less legacy, no Java, no database, web-based toolkit and more. We are excited to get executing on that.

To make this process easier, and to put to bed complaints about having our distro branches in TDF gerrit, and to move to self-hosted FOSS tooling we are launching our own gerrit to host our existing branch of core, more details on how git works here. To get involved this will mean creating a new account on the system and a few hours of disruption while our CI systems are moved over. We will continue to make contributions to LibreOffice where that makes sense (if we are welcome to), but it clearly no longer makes much sense to continue investing heavily in building what remains of TDF’s community and product for them – while being excluded from its governance. In this regard, we seem to be back where we were fifteen years ago. Meanwhile TDF continues to hire developers, sells LibreOffice and starts to act more like a staff-controlled collective than a Free Software project.

The post TDF ejects its core developers appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Open Source is International

One of the great joys of FLOSS is working with a diverse international community, and being able to collaborate with lots of other smart and experienced people with deep domain knowledge around a code-base. This makes it possible to have the skills and knowledge spread around the world to convincingly make the code native in every nation – owned by everyone.

Collabora Productivity is privileged to have staff from across the world – with corporate entities in the UK and Germany. At last count our staff were around ~50% EU citizens, ~75% NATO (UK, Canada, Turkey etc.) and the rest around the world from India to Bolivia. That diversity gives deep a robustness to our project.

Russians are of course great people, but in today’s complicated geo-political space there are legitimate concerns about building on millions of lines of code extensively commented in Russian.

One of the hot topics currently is using AI to write code, with the concern that a malicious AI could introduce subtle and hard-to-see security vulnerabilities – hence a need for lots of careful and expert review. It seems clear then that there could be some reasonable suspicions around three plus million lines of code apparently written by a large team of Russians, substantially owned and controlled by a Russian Citizen, and apparently serving Russian state customers, no matter how lovely we can presume they are as individuals. Perhaps these days AI can be used to re-write the Russian comments to English, although the comments themselves are not the security concern. LibreOffice in contrast spent many years internationalising its German comments and code-base, trying to carefully preserve the original meanings.

Collabora Office’s German Roots

Ironically, the code-base of Collabora Office actually does have very deep roots in Europe, perhaps we should promote that more: from the heroic start by Marco Börries working in his Garage in Lüneburg, through his hiring and growing a talented team in StarDivision in Hamburg, onto an exit to US based Sun Microsystems – which amazingly chose to open-source the code as OpenOffice and return it to the world. Moving on a decade, after the Oracle acquisition The Document Foundation was created based in Berlin to steward the code-base, which it has done well for around a decade (although arguably has wandered from its purpose into in-fighting recently). Collabora Productivity of course is based in the UK and Germany, so I’d like to think we are pretty European – but a positive, outward looking European sort that loves to work with and to serve many cultures & nations.

European Values – the Rule of Law

One of the key Article 2 treaty values of Europe is the rule of law. And in this area Euro-Office seems to enter a space of some considerable debate and speculation, with differences of opinion between reasonable, like-minded community members on what the right thing is to do around licensing here both morally and legally.

For a long time OnlyOffice has used what looks like a proprietary or contradictory modified AGPLv3 license with added restrictions. Many argue that it is not an Open-Source product – though of course as a customer you can buy your own license from Ascencio. The OSI recommends not doing this:

“… combining an open source license with other terms will create a new license that is neither OSI-approved nor likely one that can gain approval. Any effort to change the terms of an open source license should be met with suspicion because they are likely designed to take away freedoms, or else an already OSI-approved license would have been suitable. The subterfuge is designed to “open wash” the software, claiming to use an open source license and hoping no one looks too carefully.” User beware: Modified AGPLv3 removes freedoms, adds legal headaches.

Against that the Software Freedom Conservancy has supported the case by PureThink against Neo4J.

The Euro-Office team appears to unilaterally change the license on Ascencio’s code: “Remove unenforceable and non-obligatory Section 7 additions from copyright headers…”.

It remains to be seen whether this will play out in the courts in Europe, it appears to be a risky move, but it may come up with useful precedent.

Open Standards

There is much to be said about surrendering Digital Sovereignty around document standards, and the dangers of architecting your software and future exclusively around Microsoft’s proprietary OOXML formats (even if a standards process described that without being able to change it). Rather than repeating those arguments it might be worth reading “You are not Sovereign if Microsoft still Architects Your Documents“.

What’s Next?

Collabora Productivity has competed with OnlyOffice’s unique team, product and licensing approach for many years, in the market, the community, and through our partner network.

It has been gratifying to see our clean approach increasingly winning in the market. We like to think that is driven by the strength of our feature-function improvements, strong partner relations, excellent support, product management – as well as for the sadder geopolitical and corporate origin reasons. It is thrilling to have been able to grow our team, make the software ever more beautiful, responsive, interoperable, and to give an ever better option to all of our customers and our growing partner base. To take a couple of examples we have enjoyed working alongside Government partners like openDesk by ZenDiS to shape and steer the direction of the software for their particular needs, or to have French Government staff involved in specific UI improvements, with so many more wonderful contributions from so many others – more than we can list – not to mention the many heroic COOL, and LibreOffice community contributors we love working with.

It will be interesting to see how Euro-Office evolves. Perhaps they can bring new clarity to worldwide legal licensing issues in this area, and ship an enterprise product around this; lets see how Nextcloud’s leadership drives the project. Building a great team of office productivity experts is not the easiest thing to do, so it is nice to hear of more engineers getting trained in our space who understand the scale of the task, and with whom we hope to swap horror stories over a beer at FLOSS conferences in the future.

Ultimately – this will come down to a customer and end-user choice: what do you want to support, contribute to, and build on for your users? I’m deeply confident in our foundations, in the depth and often decades of experience of our growing team handling our challenging problem space excellently – so for a European and international office suite I recommend Collabora Online – join us.

The post A European Office Suite? appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Michael Meeks

One of the features of Collabora Online has been a way to ensure that log files (of reasonable verbosity) don’t include any personally identifying information. This allows logs to be shared by customers and partners with confidence to allow debugging unusual problems. This is done with a one-way hash, and to avoid dictionary attacks that can be salted with a random salt.

Since there is typically not a lot of personal data that goes through this process, we already store the anonymized versions in a hash-map to improve performance in future use, previously we used a fast and fairly good FNV-1a algorithm, but with this optional higher strength anonymizer commit we can now use a much stronger PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 hash for this data at some smallish CPU cost when logging.

This means customers can be confident that when sharing their logs they are not sharing personally identifying information.

The post Log anonymization appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Michael Meeks

Collabora Online puts a lot of effort into containing your changes inside a new file-system jail per document. We use chroot or unprivileged user namespaces to achieve, but in some cases we are unable to bind mount, or hard-link readonly files across. This is a problem because it is vital that we don’t allow users to change files that could be used in another jail.

In these cases we have copied the files that are required. After years of hard work to reduce this set, the jail systemplate now contains primarily two things first timezone files, and second system-fonts.

Timezone files are particularly annoying – since there are a very large number of them:

				
					$ ls -R /usr/share/zoneinfo | wc -l
1993
				
			

But in total they are very small:

				
					du -k -c /usr/share/zoneinfo/ | grep total
3020	total
				
			

ie. only around 3Mb. With this commit (and thanks for Noel Grandin’s review) we now switch to using the internal timezone database from ICU which was duplicated internally.

That should saves over half the time of jail setup, a large number of system calls, and some surprising costs in terms of memory pages, and stacked-file-system latency in unpleasant corner cases.

Faster setup, smaller jails, fewer dependencies, lets go!

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Cambridge, United Kingdom, February 14, 2019 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, is excited to announce a new, major release of our enterprise product Collabora Online 4.0. This release includes a fresh look, mobile improvements, improved interoperability, new dialogs and functionality as well as a raft of bug fixes and polish.

At the same time as our release we are updating the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) for home users, and to make it easy for everyone to try this out and get involved with integrating it into their systems. For more information please visit CODE’s page.

What has changed?

This release includes a fresh look – with improved toolbar colors and layout, mobile improvements – with support for Retina and HiDPI screens along with easier shape editing, as well as improved interoperability provided by upgrading the underlying document rendering core to Collabora Office 6.0. In addition, we introduce support for Vereign’s blockchain-powered platform which provides Collabora clients with an authentic identity management solution as well as bringing more of the rich dialogs of our core engine to users.

Refreshed Toolbar icons and layout

Toolbars have been refreshed to integrate the Colibre icon theme (thanks to Andreas Kainz) and lighter coloring, which significantly improves the look of 4.0. Compare before and after.

In addition, a new icon to hide the menu bar is now present. It further simplifies the UI.

More space Add document type icon More formatting options

The document file name – which you can click-to-rename – has been tucked into the menu more neatly. Further, a ‘click-able’ modification time – which when clicked launches the revision history – has been added.

While Collabora Online can be used as a software component integrated into a variety of products, these improvements to the visual design have been developed in close partnership with Nextcloud.

Integrating with Vereign

Vereign is a Swiss open source company building a blockchain based self-sovereign identity and personal data store. It can be hardened to Swiss banking standards. They are currently running a beta program to add authentic communication to e-mail, starting with Gmail and Roundcube. Collabora has partnered with Vereign to also provide authentic documents bearing the qualified electronic signature of your hardened self-sovereign identity.

The document_signing_url configuration key in loolwsd.xml will be pre-set to app.vereign.com for future CODE releases, as/when the API is stable. However Collabora Office users will need to enable this integration explicitly if they want it. If you are already signed up with the Vereign beta program, to send authentic email with your Gmail account, your self-sovereign identity and its passports will be immediately usable for signing documents in CODE 4.0.

Use the File → Sign document menu option to activate the ‘Vereign Toolbar’ to log into this service.

For the users who are accustomed to using the Vereign app, we have created a QR code dialogue so as to speed up their log-in process.

And after using the identity to sign the document with a qualified electronic signature according to the EU and the Swiss laws, you should see:

Vereign also supports storing – and later publishing – copies of signed documents to provide you with an independent, user owned archive of your interactions. This archive is blockchain secured, as is the audit trail of all your identity interactions.

Vereign is currently gathering interested parties for Proof of Concept (PoC) deployments next year and partners with potential use cases are encouraged to contact Vereign directly.

Improved shape editing

To make shape editing much more pleasant, and more helpful for touch users we have enlarged the size of the selection handles and made them circular. We have also added a more convenient and familiar rotation control to avoid needing to use the shape dialogue to rotate objects.

We have also added a more convenient and familiar rotation control to avoid needing to use the shape dialogue to rotate objects.
Rotation control added to shape dialogues.

When shapes are being re-sized or re-positioned, instead of just showing a rectangular profile of where the object will end up, we show a semi-transparent re-sizing preview of the new shape in its position at the new size:

Re-sizing preview:

In addition to make shape insertion easier we added a palette of all the built-in custom shapes allowing easy insertion of new shapes into the document.

Mobile device improvements

Mobile device support has improved significantly in this release in a number of critical areas. Time to first document load is improved – though it has always been possible to load, layout and calculate large and complex documents on the server – avoiding complexity and battery life impact on a small mobile device.

We have introduced a simple, stripped down viewing mode at first, to make it easier to view documents in an uncluttered way.
Stripped down viewing mode:

Toolbars are easier to use, can auto-hide, and scroll to allow a wider selection of commonly used functionality. The menus are also far easier to scroll and interact with deeper menu hierarchies.

Pinch to zoom, pan, and other multi-touch behaviors are also improved, along with the ability to zoom and pan into different areas of complex dialogues allowing the full rich functionality of the desktop designed dialogues that are larger than a mobile screen to be used conveniently.

Zooming and panning into different areas of complex dialogues:

Improvements to the special character dialog making it easier to use favorite characters in 4.0 are also visible here.

Retina / HiDPI display improvement

Version 4.0 now can take advantage of the browser’s native higher DPI to render at the display’s real resolution, getting crisp pixel rendering, for example at 200% zoom:

This has a significant effect across all components, and particularly Calc which now has a 200% zoom option.

Before and After:

 

By avoiding the browser needing to do a local scaling, we get much crisper text, and conditional formatting, as well as using your display to best effect.

We also moved to using scalable vector Colibre icons for dialogues, and rendering these at a higher resolution when needed too.

Writer improvements

Rich section properties

This feature provides users with the possibility to configure the attributes of sections of a Collabora Online Writer text document. For instance, a user can restrict editing to specific parts by locking certain sections of the text with a password in order to protect sections, perhaps legally sensitive, of a text from being changed.

Inserting a multi-level Table of Contents

Users can now insert powerful Tables of Contents (TOC) and customize them to their preference. Adding a TOC to your documents easily provides an overview of a longer text based on the headings you have used helping readers to navigate through multiple pages easily and quickly. Use “Ctrl+Click Function” to jump to a heading or sub-heading in a document.

Calc improvements

Page styling

Calc uses page styles to specify the layout of how we print pages, including line arrangement, line styles, background colour, paper format, margins, layout setting, headers, footers, and shadowing styles. These are applied via page styles you can re-use for other sheets.

Impress improvements

In Impress, every slide is based on a slide master. Masters also exist for notes, and handouts. Every type of master has predefined areas for date, header, footer, and slide numbers whose styles can be customized. When editing online, to provide quick information about your contents, you need to be able to create, edit, and customize the Header and Footer as well as Bullets and Numbering features. Here’s some descriptions and screenshots of the dialogues.

Header and footer

This feature allows you to create a header and footer for your slides, notes and handouts, without having to editing the Masters themselves.

Bullets and numbering

This allows rich customization of the position, type and size of bullets and numbering to create the ideal lists. All the changes can be made using the Bullets and Numbering dialog box, which can be accessed through the Format menu.

Miscellaneous Online improvements

• Security and document jail creation performance – particularly on stackable file-systems – has been significantly improved by removing all of the Collabora Office code from the document jails.
• Improved Thumbnailing API via accelerated convert-to implementation, allowing easier file browsing.
• Translations have been expanded, thanks to the enthusiastic LibreOffice teams to include reasonable localizations to thirty-seven popular languages.

Improvements from Collabora Office 6.0

Collabora Online re-uses the same underlying core document rendering and interoperability engine based on LibreOffice provided by Collabora Office 6.0. Collabora Online 4.0 upgrades us to the new 6.0 version – which includes many improvements from the wider LibreOffice community, such as:

• many improvements across Visio, MS Publisher, Keynote, Pages & Numbers filters (thanks to the Document Liberation Project)
  

• Much improved EMF+ rendering (thanks to Bartosz Kosiorek)
• Spreadsheet loading and calculation performance improvements
• Substantially improved EMF+ (OLE object) preview rendering
• Improved table styles & border rendering
• Improved interoperability – with many improvements to OpenXML (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX) support, support for new attributes, and wins for legacy SmartArt shapes without DrawingML fallback.

For more details, and credits around Collabora Office 6.0 please see https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-office-6-0/

Getting Collabora Online 4.0

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 our home page for 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 Enteprise 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.

Online demo

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

For more information:

• Communications and Marketing: marketing@collaboraoffice.com
• Sales: sales@collaboraoffice.com

About Collabora Productivity:

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing 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.

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View the announcement on Gov.uk here

UK Government buyers have signed a new commercial deal for Open Source office applications on desktop, mobile, and cloud. The “Cloud Transition Agreement” between the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), an executive arm of the Cabinet Office, and British Open Source software firm Collabora Productivity, states the Government’s commitment to Open Source and Open Document Format, and offers major cost savings for public sector bodies.

“Moving to the cloud, adopting Open IT Standards, and saving the taxpayer money are three key Government objectives achieved by today’s agreement” said Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity. “Open Source flexibility, always-on access, and British innovation are combining to deliver powerful productivity to Government”.

Two products are covered by the agreement: Collabora Office is the desktop office suite that supports over one hundred document formats, including Microsoft Office and Google Docs. Forthcoming Collabora CloudSuite extends Collabora Office with cloud-based and mobile access, providing viewing and editing locally on devices, and online in web browsers. It is set for release later this year.

“Technologies provided by Collabora will play a key role in Government IT transformation”
said Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity

“Collabora will work together with The Crown Commercial Service to raise awareness of the benefits of the Open Document Format (ODF) as well as the more general benefits and cost savings of Open Source client solutions”. He added: “An integral part of this agreement reflects the level of support and commitment Collabora will provide concerning the deployment of the Open Document Format”.

All non-profit making Government Organisations benefit from the agreement, and will be able to deploy the software internally to host private document clouds integrated with existing systems. With a comprehensive feature set comparable to other office suites, Collabora’s applications have potential to benefit all arms of Government. These products compliment Collabora’s existing document migration and interoperability services available from the G-Cloud Digital Marketplace.

Learn more: Collabora GovOffice

About Collabora Productivity:
Collabora Productivity delivers LibreOffice products and consulting to the enterprise. With the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office provides a business-hardened office suite with long term multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora Ltd., the global software consultancy specializing in providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specialising in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries.

Request more information!

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Today we present our new brand and a preview of a brand new product. As the LibreOffice Conference 2015 takes place over the next three days in Aarhus, Denmark, more details will be revealed and demonstrated.

The post Technology Preview Arrives appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Today we release two major upgrades for OS X users: LibreOffice Vanilla, the latest LibreOffice from the Document Foundation for early adopters, packaged by Collabora, hits version 5.0. At the same time LibreOffice-from-Collabora, our extra-stable productivity suite for professionals and enterprise users, reaches version 4.4.

LibreOffice Vanilla

Released last month, LibreOffice 5 Vanilla brings an overhauled user interface, brand new icon set, and, especially relevant for Mac owners: improved support for high resolution (HiDPI) Retina displays, among many other improvements.

Of these, 18 new features were contributed by Collabora Engineers, including improved interoperability with OOXML and RTF documents, preview of styles and formatting in the sidebar, and all-new support for customisable shortcodes.

LibreOffice-from-Collabora

Following hot the heels of last week’s general release, LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 is now available via the Mac App Store for $10. Combining rigorously tested features from LibreOffice 4.4 with new features developed by Collabora, this release offers new compatibility, deployment management, and document integrity features. Read more about our latest enterprise release in the release announcement.

No effort necessary

Existing users of Collabora’s apps from the Mac App Store need not lift a finger — today’s updates will be automatically detected and prompt you for upgrade. All prior purchases of LibreOffice-from-Collabora include the 4.4 upgrade as well as future patches. Once your update is installed, don’t forget to leave an updated review of your experience for other iTunes users!

The post LibreOffice 5 Vanilla and LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 released in Mac App Store appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Today’s release of LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 combines Collabora’s latest compatibility, deployment management, and document integrity features with a host of improvements from the LibreOffice community. Redesigned toolbars, menus, rulers, and dialogues make these powerful additions more attractive and efficient to use.

Manage complex user needs with ease

LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 allows system administrators to quickly apply per-user configurations to large-scale deployments thanks to extended support for Windows Server ADMX Group Policy templates. Developed by Collabora, this facility allows multiple users on a single machine to have separate local settings, managed centrally by an administrator. These include over 25,000 options such as those relating to language, security, and file formats.

Better Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility

Today’s release extends support for OOXML documents created by Microsoft Office 2007 by anticipating and accommodating non-OOXML-compliant formatting generated by that application, resulting in more accurate rendering of documents.

Timestamping: secure document integrity

Fresh support for the Time Stamp Protocol (TSP) allows for independent verification of PDF document integrity. Required for submission of legal documents in Switzerland and other regions, this provide a convenient, automated way to prove that a document existed with particular content at a given time and date. Free TSP services mean anyone can use this feature to show important documents were created at a certain time.

Ever-better performance

Collabora engineers deliver performance improvements to loading, saving, and mail-merging documents:

• Exporting to OOXML is significantly faster thanks to low-level data serialisation improvements
• Mail merge in Writer using large contact lists significantly more efficient
• Use of a new JPEG image library delivers 2x benefit during handling of those images
• Storing documents which include images is faster, thanks to smarter document saving

The post LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 introduces OOXML, PDF, and configuration management improvements appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

On June 16th Managing Director Michael Meeks presented Collabora’s ongoing work on LibreOffice Online at the University of Bern for Cloud Day 2015. A video of the talk is now on YouTube courtesy of Ch-open, who hosted the event.

The post “The Cloud is our future” — Collabora presents LibreOffice Online in Bern appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.