Collabora Office Archives - Collabora Online and Collabora Office

Interop EXPLAINED

Richard Brock — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:46:57 +0000

Confused by buzzwords? You’re not alone.

EXPLAINED is a new explainer series for people who work with technology – but don’t want marketing fluff or academic theory.

We break down complex digital topics clearly and practically: what they mean, why they matter, and how they work in the real world.

You may have seen documents change slightly between tools – sometimes that’s between different companies’ applications, sometimes it’s even the same company’s browser-based or desktop offering. A table moves, a font changes, something is missing, or a layout looks just a bit off.

It’s all because of differences between how documents are described by both editors and file formats. The good news is: modern document editors can be designed to handle the linguistic differences.

Not all formats speak the same language

English and Chinese are the two most commonly spoken languages, each with over 1 billion speakers. Both languages are used effectively every day to describe the world, conduct business, govern, teach, and communicate. They don’t however encode information in exactly the same way, and each contains unique words and features.

Let’s take a look at a simple example:

English: Where is the OOXML proprietary documentation?

Chinese: OOXML专有文档在哪里？(OOXML proprietary documentation is where?)

The difference in word order is obvious. With a little study, even an average student will learn to make the change reliably.

Less obvious perhaps is that the Chinese sentence is missing a ‘the’ equivalent. This is because Chinese has no definite (or indefinite) article. This creates the possibility of data loss when the sentence is ‘round tripped’ from English to Chinese and back to English, perhaps resulting in the erroneous final output, “Where is OOXML proprietary documentation?”

Fortunately for anyone invested in international communications/trade/politics/sport, these translation questions are easily resolved with an experienced translator. Similarly for anyone interested in document interoperability, the question is well served by a document editor such as Collabora Office.

How document editors should translate

Modern document formats such as OOXML (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx …) and ODF (.odt, .ods, .odp …) are both highly capable and widely used. But like languages, they express certain details differently.

Each editor has a native file format, like a mother tongue. For Collabora Office, that is ODF, which is a truly open format with an open development process. For Microsoft that is OOXML, “a pseudo-standard that pretends to be open”.

Ideally, a well-designed document editor acts like a skilled translator. It ensures that documents open, display, and behave consistently, even when moving between formats.

To do this, the document editor uses what are known as import and export filters ensuring that features are handled correctly. This does however leave open the question of what to happens to features that are only available in one format and therefore cannot be ‘translated’ (similar to the ‘the’ from the above example).

A good way to illustrate this question is by showing what happens when it goes wrong. Microsoft opens and edits all files in the OOXML format. This means if you open an ODP with the total slide count in the template in PowerPoint for example, a feature OOXML does not have, it permanently throws away the information – even without trying to open or save the file as .pptx. PowerPoint’s mother tongue is OOXML, so it has no idea what means.

This makes us sad! We like to know how much longer a presentation is going to go on for…

In the case of a feature missing between formats in the Collabora Office suite, we tend touse what we call ‘grab bags’ to temporarily store the document feature before saving it again in its original format. Ideally, PowerPoint would operate more like the Collabora Office suite, and recognise this as information it doesn’t fully understand but that should be retained somehow. Unfortunately that is not the case.

Regrettably, this principle is not well understood by many, even by those who are aware of the problem of dependency on Microsoft’s OOXML. Two of the first five issues raised in a new office suite’s GitHub repos are duplicate requests for the suite to default to ODF. Unfortunately the office suite in question is based on a document editor that primarily speaks OOXML and has poor ODF support, so the requests are unlikely to be actioned.

Not all technologies speak the same language

Many (most?) Microsoft Office users will have noticed that Microsoft Office features look and behave differently depending on if a document is opened in the browser, or using the desktop app. This is because the applications known to most as “Microsoft Office” are in fact two independently developed applications – Word Desktop and Word Web. Confusing the situation further, Microsoft appears to have multiple and slightly differing descriptions of how features operate between the two.

Technically, this is a different question to file format interoperability, but feature availability is nonetheless important and plays a significant role in the interoperability equation. There’s no point having a document editor that cannot edit your documents right? Microsoft disagrees it would seem: “Microsoft Word Web App lets you make basic edits and formatting changes to your document in a web browser. For more advanced features, use Word Web App’s Open in Word command […] some features work differently in the two environments.” (Accessed 31/03/2026)

Fortunately for users of the Collabora Office suite, with the newly released Collabora Office, they can enjoy one and the same editing and document rendering experience whether editing documents in-browser, or on their desktop thanks to the fully shared codebase between the two apps.

Achieving perfect interoperability

We’d like to say that we are perfect translators, understanding everything and converting 100% of documents flawlessly, but this would be untrue. What we can say is we are excellent at working with both Microsoft file formats and ODF.

Additionally, unlike most Microsoft format based editors, we think it is important to work well with both legacy document types, as well as the open future. Arguments suggesting that because we encourage usage of ODF, we must therefore not be appropriate for use with .docx or .xlsx are poor and don’t stand up to scrutiny. Just because we’re great at ODF doesn’t stop us being great at interop too.

While we prefer ODF dues to it’s openness and documentation, we support and develop OOXML, both for new features that come with new versions. As a company, we deliberately use both formats internally, and do not encounter issues in our regular working. With our support these minor dialectical difference don’t need to hold up real-world large-scale migrations either.

Among other efforts to improve interoperability, over the past year we have been focusing on validity testing of about 243 000 documents, spreadsheets and presentations in various formats converted to the corresponding OOXML format, with the goal of getting to zero. The following chart shows the progress over the last few months for spreadsheets and presentations.

Achieving perfect interop?

You should be able to open a document, edit it, share it, and know it will behave as expected. This will only be fully achieved as the world moves to a truly open standard, and away from the Microsoft owned/governed semi-proprietary confusion.

Additionally your documents should behave the same in your browser, on your desktop, or in your pocket. This is now possible with shared-codebase programs like Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

In the meantime, we continue to deal with the reality of ubiquitous Microsoft-format legacy documents, and are pleased that the vast majority of users will not discover issues opening and editing Microsoft file types in their day to day work with Collabora Office.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, we encourage you to try out the Collabora Office suite – and enjoy working across platforms and formats with confidence.

The post Interop EXPLAINED appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Collabora Office for Mobile: Your Documents, Fully Rendered on the Go

Richard Brock — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:31:47 +0000

We don’t just work from a desk. We work from trains, coffee shops and waiting rooms. And yet for many, mobile document apps are a compromise. Perhaps useful to quickly open a file, check a detail, or make a small change, but often falling short when it comes to faithfully displaying the document you created elsewhere.

That matters more than it might seem, and means mobile apps are often ignored. When a document is part of a real workflow – a contract, a report, a spreadsheet, a presentation, a policy paper, a flow diagram, a bid, or a briefing – you need to trust that what you see on your phone or tablet is the same document your colleagues see on desktop or in the browser. Not an approximation. Not a simplified version. The same document.

That is where Collabora Office for Mobile comes in.

A common code base for desktop and mobile

Collabora Office for Mobile is not a separate, cut-down document viewer built around different assumptions. It uses the same core rendering engine as Collabora Office for desktop and Collabora Online in the browser.

That means documents are rendered consistently across the full Collabora Office suite. Whether you open a file on your desktop, in your browser, or on your phone while travelling, you are working from the same foundation. Layout, formatting, tables, images, charts, styles, and document structure are handled by the same underlying engine.

You can review a document on your phone and know that you are seeing the document as it really is. You can check a presentation before a meeting, review a spreadsheet while travelling, or read a report in the field without worrying that the mobile app has shifted something, hidden something, or interpreted it differently. When documents move between devices, that consistency matters.

Many document apps on the market prioritise convenience, but can introduce rendering differences depending on format, feature support, or the platform you are using. That may be acceptable for casual notes or lightweight editing. It is not acceptable when the document itself carries real operational, legal, or organisational importance. Collabora Office for Mobile is designed for those moments where accuracy matters just as much as access.

Why rendering consistency matters

Collabora Office for Mobile is especially valuable because it fits into a wider document workflow rather than sitting outside it. It works as the perfect accompaniment to Collabora Online and Collabora Office on desktop, helping form a complete and rounded office suite across devices.

This makes it particularly useful for people who are frequently away from their desks. Travelling employees can review meeting materials on the move. Field staff can access documents in operational environments. Engineering teams, logistics workers, consultants, inspectors, and public-sector teams can all open the documents they need with greater confidence that what they are viewing is accurate. In some contexts this is simply about convenience. In others, it is about mistakes.

A different UI for a different device

Of course, a mobile app cannot simply copy a desktop interface onto a phone screen and call it done.
Phones and tablets are very different environments. On a small display, screen space is limited, touch is your main input method, and the on-screen keyboard immediately competes for room with menus, toolbars, and document content. Designing a good office experience for mobile is difficult precisely because documents themselves have not become simpler, even if the screen has become smaller.

That is why we have invested heavily in optimising the mobile user experience.

It is also worth distinguishing between using Collabora Online on a mobile phone or tablet browser, and using the dedicated mobile app. In a mobile browser, users are still working through their EFSS or integration platform, so they will retain access to platform-specific features such as granular user-based permissions, @ing users in documents or comments, version-history lgging, etc. The dedicated mobile app on the other hand offers the same beautiful Collabora editing interface, but cannot include all of these integration-specific controls. This is not a limitation of the Collabora Office for Mobile app, but is because mobile apps operate within highly sandboxed environment. In practice, that means the app delivers the same document rendering and editing experience, while the browser remains the route to the wider EFSS workflow around the document.

On tablets, Collabora Office for Mobile provides a much more desktop-like interface, giving users more familiar controls and a layout that makes better use of the larger screen. This is particularly important for users who want continuity between desktop and tablet workflows, or who use a tablet as a serious work device rather than just a companion screen.
On phones, the interface becomes more responsive and adaptive. Menus and controls can step back when needed so that the document itself gets more space, especially once the keyboard is open and the user is typing. That sounds simple, but getting the balance right is not easy. Too many controls on screen, and the document becomes cramped and frustrating to use. Too few, and editing becomes awkward. A good mobile office app needs to know when to stay visible and when to get out of the way.

The goal is not to pretend that a phone is a desktop replacement in every scenario. The goal is to make sure that when you do need to act on a document from your mobile device, the experience is clear, capable, and dependable.

Accessibility matters too

A modern office suite also has to work well for everyone. That includes users who rely on accessibility tools and assistive technologies.

Collabora Office for Mobile includes strong accessibility support, including screen reader functionality, helping more users work with documents effectively on mobile devices. That is important not only from an inclusion perspective, but also from a practical one. Mobile access should not come at the expense of usability.

One suite, across every screen

The real value of Collabora Office for Mobile is not just that it works on phones and tablets. It is that it fits into a larger picture.

Desktop, browser, and mobile should not feel like separate worlds with different document behaviour and different levels of trust. They should be different ways of accessing the same office experience, adapted sensibly for each device.
That is what Collabora Office for Mobile helps deliver – the same document engine, thoughtful mobile design, practical editing, strong accessibility, and a natural companion to the rest of the Collabora Office suite.

Ready for document editing in your pocket? Try it out today!

The post Collabora Office for Mobile: Your Documents, Fully Rendered on the Go appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Distributed by Design: How Modern Open Source Works

Richard Brock — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:11:57 +0000

TL;DR
Modern open-source software isn’t built in one place or along a single path. Tools like Git enable independent development while preserving shared history, provenance, and open collaboration. This allows different organisations to move at different speeds, and supports long-term users without central coordination. Large projects such as the Linux kernel have long operated this way, combining decentralised development with shared standards and open code. What matters isn’t where development happens, but that users receive stable, secure, and openly auditable software that continues to serve diverse needs at scale.

Open source isn’t a single repository

There’s a mental model of a software repository as a single, central place where “the real code” lives, and everything else is somehow downstream of it.

In reality, open source today is a network of repositories, contributors, and workflows, connected by shared history and shared standards – not by a single gate.

And that’s largely thanks to Git.

A quick, practical explanation of Git?

Developed in 2005, Git is the system most modern open-source software uses to manage code.

At its simplest, Git answers three questions:

What changed?
Who changed it & when?
How does this relate to everything that came before?

But the important thing isn’t just tracking changes – it’s how Git enables collaboration.

Everyone has the whole project

With Git, every developer can have a full copy of the codebase on their own machine.

Not just the latest version – the entire history.

That means no single server is “the” source of truth, work doesn’t stop if a service goes offline, and it enables developers to work independently, offline, and in parallel
Each copy is complete and verifiable.

Work happens in many repositories

Instead of everyone editing the same version of the code at once, Git encourages work to happen on clones. There are many reasons for this, but essentially it enables developers to try new features and fixes on the code, without potentially causing disruption to others.

Copies can be short-lived or long-running, shared or private. They’re simple to create, easy to merge, and easy to discard.

Parallel development is the standard operating procedure.

Git makes independence normal - not exceptional

Git isn’t just a version control system; it’s a different way of thinking about collaboration.

With Git:

Everyone can have a complete copy of the codebase
Every copy usually includes the entire history, in a cryptographically linked chain
- This makes it extremely difficult to smuggle in malicious changes unnoticed. You can’t quietly rewrite the past – any alteration breaks this chain of links and is immediately detectable.
Every developer can work on their own code, at their own pace
A single developer can pull code from multiple remote sources
Code can flow between repositories, not just “up” or “down”

This is what makes Git a real powerhouse in the programming world. Each commit hash uniquely defines the full history up to that point and the entire repository state. Provenance is built in. Trust is verifiable. Collaboration doesn’t depend on a single server or a single workflow.

Built-in resilience and disaster recovery

One of the most overlooked strengths of Git’s distributed model is resilience. Because every clone is a complete copy of the project – including its full history – the future of the codebase does not depend on a single server, organisation, or hosting provider to survive.

If a hosting platform disappears, the project does not disappear with it. If a company changes direction, the code remains available. If infrastructure fails, development can continue from any full copy.

Traditional software vendors often rely on expensive source code escrow agreements as a safeguard in case a supplier collapses. With open-source software managed by Git, this protection comes baked into the technical architecture for everyone.

Disaster recovery is no longer a contingency plan, it is the default state of the system.

This resilience matters deeply for governments, enterprises, and long-term infrastructure projects. Software that underpins critical systems must not depend on a single point of failure – organisational or technical.

More forks than a restaurant ?

In some git-based development flows, the process of creating your own repository to work on new features and fixes independently is called forking.

On platforms like GitHub, it’s a prominent button at the top of the page because it’s a normal part of how distributed development works.

At the time of this screenshot for example, there were 978 forked copies of the Collabora Online source code – most of them made by developers eager to contribute back to the goodness – we love that!

Multiple remotes, multiple maintainers, multiple priorities, connected by shared code, shared history, bonds of friendship and collaboration powered by the Git synchronisation protocol. The choice of hosting and infrastructure becomes an almost irrelevant detail, with developers choosing the tools and processes that best support their work.

Improvements can be exchanged, and collaboration can happen without requiring everyone to follow the same internal processes or timelines.

At the same time, in ecosystems with many development paths, trusted editors play a critical role in curating, integrating, and supporting coherent, branded, secure releases.

This is how most large open-source projects already work

The largest open-source project in the world is the mainline Linux kernel.

While there is a widely recognised upstream integration tree, Linux development does not start in one place, nor does it follow a single linear path.

Most Linux code is written outside the mainline tree. Subsystem maintainers, vendors, researchers, and long-term support teams all develop in their own repositories, often with different goals, timelines, and constraints. Some of this work is later integrated upstream. Some of it remains long-lived and independent. Both are normal, accepted, and essential to how the ecosystem functions.

What people perceive as ‘Linux’ is usually a distribution kernel which is built not only from the mainline Kernel, but often includes a selection of drivers and updates and fixes maintained in many other Git repositories. This pattern is visible well beyond the kernel itself. Ubuntu is a long-running derivative of Debian. The two projects share a common foundation, diverge where their priorities differ, and regularly exchange fixes and improvements. They cooperate closely, but they are not trying to be the same thing, and both are excellent solutions for their use cases and target audiences.

This model of decentralised development, shared history, and open standards is what allows open-source projects to support different needs and directions without forcing a single pace or a single set of priorities. It’s how mature, secure software scales.

The outcome that matters

At the end of the day, this isn’t about repositories or hosting platforms.

It’s about delivering:

Stable, well-maintained software
Faster iteration where it matters
Long-term support users can rely on
Open-source code that remains open, auditable, and reusable

Independent development isn’t a departure from open-source values. It is how those values continue to work at scale.

So which repository do I use ?

Most organisations don’t want to build from source or track dozens of repositories. They want dependable releases: professionally built binaries, timely security updates, long-term maintenance, and stable leadership. What matters is having a version that is coherently integrated, responsibly maintained, and ready to deploy.

At the same time, open development thrives on participation. So if you want to contribute, follow the energy! Look at development pace, commit activity, responsiveness, and long-term sustainability. Join the project where work is happening, improvements are welcomed, collaboration is active, and you feel at home.

That’s the role we play with Collabora Office. In a landscape of many repositories and development paths, we provide a stable, security-hardened, professionally supported release – while keeping the door open for collaboration and contribution. Open source gives you the freedom to choose, we aim to be the choice you can build on.

The post Distributed by Design: How Modern Open Source Works appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

You Are Not Sovereign If Microsoft Still Architects Your Documents

Richard Brock — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:37:53 +0000

Sovereignty or Legacy, You Choose

There is a lot of energy right now around European digital stacks. Self-hosted infrastructure. Local control. Reduced dependence on American cloud vendors. And all of that matters.

It seems to be a pattern that people take other people’s software that they have not written, and will struggle to support and put their brand on it, and wrap a European flag around it

But we should be honest about one thing – you are not sovereign if Microsoft still defines the fundamental design of your application, as well as your document formats.

You can move the server. You can change the branding. You can even swap out one vendor for another. But if the office layer at the heart of your stack is still at root built around Microsoft’s file formats, then they still set the rules that matter most. Your documents live inside a model you do not control, cannot meaningfully govern, and have no real power to shape.

That is not digital sovereignty. That is a hosting decision.

Self-hosting is not the same as sovereignty

A self-hosted office suite built around OOXML may reduce dependency on Microsoft 365 as a service. It may reduce exposure to American hyperscalers. It may tick some procurement boxes. But it does not solve the deeper problem – after all, you could do this with SharePoint 2019 till recently.

OOXML is Microsoft’s document model, standardised after the fact. Microsoft’s own documentation clearly describes .docx .xlsx and .pptx as formats to “support the features and behavior of Microsoft Office” while noting that ODF and Open XML reflect different application behaviours and feature sets. These are not neutral containers floating above the market, they reflect the architecture, priorities and direction of the organisations that created them.

That matters because formats are not just a way to save files. They encode the document model itself: what features exist, how layouts behave, how compatibility is judged, what gets preserved, and what gets lost. If you open an .odp presentation with the total slide count in the template in Microsoft PowerPoint, or save the file as a .pptx for example, PowerPoint and the .pptx file format simply throw away the information. If you want that feature back, good luck with the Microsoft support forums…

In short, if your strategy is to architect your software around Microsoft’s models, you can play with the UI styling and colours, but your product direction is being decided elsewhere.

You can call that interoperability, you can call it compatibility, for legacy workflows, it is certainly important and necessary. But you cannot call this strategy sovereignty.

OOXML is a legacy requirement, not a sovereign strategy

Realistically, organisations do need strong interoperability with Microsoft formats.

They exchange files with customers, suppliers, ministries, universities, courts, regulators, and partners, many of whom currently live in the Microsoft world. But the editing phase of a document’s life is usually very brief, even if it is to be archived for many years afterwards (for example the UK Healthcare Regulatory Agency mandates archiving medical records that are created in an afternoon for 25 years).

This is why moving forwards, OOXML should be treated as a legacy requirement, but it cannot be the foundation of a sovereign strategy. The strategic question is not whether you can open a .docx. Of course you need this. The strategic question is what format you want to build your future around.

If your answer is “whatever Microsoft does,” then you have not escaped the dependency – you are just reacting to it from a different server location.

A sovereign document strategy needs a format that is governed openly, developed through a genuine standards process, and not simply inherited from one vendor’s product decisions. That is where ODF matters. ODF is maintained through OASIS and published as an ISO/IEC standard. It is an open, international standard for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics, developed through an open committee process. It is not “thrown over the wall” as the latest non-negotiable output of a single vendor’s decisions.

If you are serious about sovereignty, new templates, new internal workflows, and new documents should move towards an open standard you can actually participate in and build upon.

Old documents can remain old documents. They should be opened and rendered correctly, and archive formats like PDF and PDF/A remain important. Similarly, for the present time at least, external collaboration will continue to require excellent OOXML interoperability.

But new sovereign workflows should not be born dependent on Microsoft.

Don’t get confused by marketing

There is nothing wrong with saying a product has strong OOXML interoperability – we all work on it. The mistake is turning that into the main sovereignty story.

ONLYOFFICE, for example, leans heavily on this message. Its public materials describe its editor as using OOXML natively, with all files converted into the format “when opening and editing files”.

Quoting directly: “If the file format is different from OOXML, it will still be converted to the corresponding OOXML […] As the formats are fundamentally different, some data (such as charts, tables, autoshapes or images) and formatting can be lost due to the simple reason that some formats […] treat them differently than OOXML standard does.”

That’s great if you want to centre your digital strategy around Microsoft, but absurd as the centrepiece of a digital sovereignty pitch.

True interoperability is: “We can work with the legacy world.”

And true sovereignty says: “We won’t build our future around the proprietary past.”

If your product story begins and ends with how closely you follow Microsoft’s formats, then your roadmap is still architected by Microsoft.

Sovereignty is also about trust

Across the industry, buyers are starting to ask harder questions about where code comes from, who governs it, who controls the commercial rights around it, and whether the supply chain is something they can trust. So it is striking that some people seem willing to wave those questions away when it comes to the ONLYOFFICE code-base.

Public concern about the product’s Russian ties is not imaginary. TU Berlin for example announced that it was ending business relations with ONLYOFFICE and moving to Collabora Online, explicitly stating that, “ONLYOFFICE falls under the sanctions of the EU and Germany against Russia”.

Muddying the sovereign waters further, ONLYOFFICE’s own documentation states that ONLYOFFICE Docs Enterprise Edition is “distributed under a commercial proprietary license”. That alone should be enough for sovereignty-minded buyers to slow down and question their direction. What is open? What is closed? And what happens when the commercial incentives change?

Public campaign sites and community discussions have also pointed to the huge volume of Russian-language code comments, branding similarities with the Russian R7 Office suite, and a broader effort to distance the current commercial presentation from the project’s Russian history. Whether you agree with a national origin boycott or not, the underlying question raised seems fair – if buyers now care about provenance, why would they be relaxed about opaque or politically sensitive origins for such a critical layer of their document stack?

A serious sovereign strategy looks different

A serious sovereign office strategy is not anti-interoperability. It is not naive about legacy requirements, and it does not pretend the world can abandon Microsoft formats overnight.

It does something more serious than that. It supports legacy Microsoft formats, because reality demands it. It encourages ODF for new sovereign documents, because strategy demands it. And it chooses 100% open-source code, built in the open, for all to collaborate with – that strengthens independence rather than undermining it.

This is the real question for buyers evaluating office suites today. Not “Can it open a Word file?” Everyone can do that. But the harder and more important question is “Who defines the future of your documents?”

Where we stand

At Collabora Productivity, we are not confused about this.

Interoperability matters. Organisations need to work with Microsoft formats every day, and any serious office suite must support that reality. But sovereignty has to mean more than rendering the legacy world nicely, as we do.

It means open standards. It means giving organisations a path towards ODF for new documents and sovereign workflows. It means a platform built by a large, experienced team, in an open, friendly and welcoming community, and it means 100% open source code. Not open to a certain point, not open with strings attached, and especially not code controlled by countries hostile to free and open communications.

Don’t build on software endorsed by, and used by the Russian state and built around Microsoft’s file formats.

Free your documents today, with Collabora Office.

The post You Are Not Sovereign If Microsoft Still Architects Your Documents appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Who Has the Keys to Your Data?

Richard Brock — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:20:18 +0000

The Uncomfortable Truth About Microsoft Customer Lockbox

There is a question that every organisation storing data in Microsoft 365 should be asking, but most never do: can Microsoft access your files, emails, and documents without your knowledge or consent?

The answer, by default, is yes – and Microsoft will even sell you a feature to do something about it.

What Is Customer Lockbox?

Customer Lockbox is a Microsoft 365 feature that gives organisations the ability to explicitly approve or deny access requests from Microsoft support engineers before they can view customer content. When a Microsoft engineer needs access to your data to investigate a support issue, a notification is sent to your administrators, who must approve the request. If they don’t respond within the time window, access is denied.

On the surface, this sounds perfectly reasonable. But step back for a moment and consider what this feature’s very existence implies.

The Feature That Should Never Have Been Necessary

Customer Lockbox exists because, without it, access to your data is governed entirely by Microsoft’s own internal policies and processes – not by you.

Microsoft’s standard position is that it operates on a “Zero Standing Access” principle: engineers don’t have persistent access to customer data, and access is granted on a just-in-time, least-privilege basis. That sounds reassuring. But here is the critical distinction: those controls are Microsoft’s controls, not yours. The gatekeeper is the same organisation that also wants access to your data. You are not in the room when that decision is made. You may not even be notified that it happened.

Customer Lockbox changes this by adding the customer as a required approver. It shifts the control point from Microsoft’s internal process to your organisation’s administrators. In other words, it gives you the ability to consent.

Consent however shouldn’t be a premium feature.

That Microsoft has packaged the ability to approve access to your own data as an optional add-on – available only to customers willing and able to pay for it – tells you a great deal about how the company thinks about data privacy.

Who Can Afford Privacy?

Customer Lockbox is bundled with Microsoft 365 E5, the highest and most expensive enterprise licensing tier, or available as part of the Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance add-on. For the vast majority of organisations – small and medium businesses, schools, non-profits, public sector bodies operating on constrained budgets – it is simply out of reach.

This creates a two-tier privacy landscape. Large, well-resourced enterprises can buy some oversight* of their own data. Everyone else accepts whatever Microsoft’s internal policies happen to say on any given day.

This should be deeply uncomfortable. Data sensitivity is not proportional to the size or wealth of the organisation holding it. Healthcare providers, legal services, schools small and large and everything in between all handle highly sensitive and personal data. They should be accessing the same level of control over their data as a Fortune 500 company. The idea that of data sovereignty as a luxury good is not a neutral business decision. It is a statement about whose privacy matters.

*The Lock Microsoft Will Always Open

The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act), passed in the US in 2018, allows US law enforcement to compel US-headquartered companies – including Microsoft – to produce data stored on their servers, regardless of where in the world that data physically resides.
Customer Lockbox does not protect against this. Customer Lockbox governs Microsoft engineer access for support and operational purposes. It has no bearing on legally compelled government disclosure. Microsoft can be required to hand over your data without notifying you, without your consent, and potentially under a gag order that prevents them from telling you it happened.
Microsoft is a US company. No matter where your data is hosted – including EU data centres – it remains subject to US jurisdiction through the CLOUD Act.

Privacy Should Be the Default, Not a Product

The deeper issue here is one of design philosophy. A company that genuinely places privacy at the centre of its product decisions builds oversight, transparency, and consent into the default experience. It does not reserve these things for paying subscribers.

Our approach at Collabora Productivity is rooted in a different set of assumptions. Our products are built on open-source foundations, designed for self-hosted deployment, and architected so that your data stays where you put it – on infrastructure you control, with access policies that you define. We don’t provide a back-door support channel through which a third party can request access to your documents. There is no premium tier required to retain meaningful sovereignty over your files.

Because that is what software should look like when the organisation building it genuinely thinks privacy matters.

What You Can Do

If you are using Microsoft 365, it is worth understanding exactly what tier you are on and whether Customer Lockbox is available to you.

More broadly, we would encourage organisations to ask harder questions of any cloud platform they use:

Who can access our data, and under what circumstances?
Do we receive notification when that access occurs?
Do we have the ability to approve or deny it?
Is that ability included as standard, or is it something we have to pay for?

And if you’re not sure about any of the answers, get in touch with us to experience a truly customer-centric, privacy-respecting office suite.

The post Who Has the Keys to Your Data? appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Collabora Productivity contributions in LibreOffice 26.2

Richard Brock — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:42:13 +0000

For over 12 years, Collabora Productivity has been privileged to work as one part of a broader community of enthusiastic developers, both volunteers and paid, collaborating to make an open source office suite that is free to download and trusted by millions of users.

The LibreOffice codebase is the foundation of Collabora Online, our enterprise, document-editing and online collaboration product – and as long-standing members of the community, we are excited to contribute to LibreOffice releases with 26.2 available today!

Our contributions

With the merger with allotropia software GmbH in May 2025, our commits to the codebase for 2025 (from January to the end of December), as per The Document Foundation’s State of the Project 2025, amounted to around 45% of the total commits from over 50 individuals. While Collabora Productivity is part of a global community of committers, we were fortunate enough to be able to contribute more than half of the documented features from the release notes for LibreOffice 26.2. In terms of total commits, this amounted to around 2,000, but, more importantly, fixed over 500 issues (including commits merged from 25.8 to 26.2.02). The chart shows the feature areas from the release notes where Collabora engineers contributed code.

Improvements in LibreOffice 26.2

It is fair to say this release focuses less on new features and instead offers many improvements to app performance and a smoother overall experience with LibreOffice. Collabora Productivity, together with peers in the community, have also worked diligently to improve interoperability and compatibility issues, and here are some of Collabora’s contribution highlights:

Writer: Auto Captions and Fixes

AutoCaptions – When you paste in an image, Writer auto-inserts a caption, as long as you check the box in Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > AutoCaptions.
Better handling of Floating Tables – Tables are better behaved! Previously, Writer prioritised keeping tables and headers together, which meant they could both slide onto the next page if there wasn’t enough space left on the page. Sometimes this disrupted document flow, creating a large gap on the previous page, but this is now fixed. Read how it was fixed on Miklos Vajna’s blog.
Better DOCX interoperability for Floating Tables – The handling of the Table Split feature has improved. Prior to 26.2, this would result in two floating tables inside one frame, which couldn’t be exported to DOCX.

Track Changes improved – You have greater choice when handling interdependent changes now, and can select the ‘layer’ to change in the Manage Changes, e.g., you can choose a format change that’s on top of a Delete or Insert change.

Calc: Supporting more features

BIFF12 support – The max limit for pasting from Excel to Calc has increased. Prior to 26.2, Calc could paste 65,536 rows. With the Biff12 file format (Excel 2007+) supported, users can paste 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns per sheet.
XmlMaps support – Users spotted that XLSX spreadsheets lost xmlMaps.xml when opened in Calc and saved as an XLSX file. With xmlMaps.xml support, users can create direct, structural links between cells and external XML data files, e.g., turning Calc into an interface for managing XML data.

Chart: Live Preview for Sidebar

Live Preview – It’s quicker to select colour schemes. When a user mouses over Chart data range colour palette entries, it shows a live preview in the active chart.

Performance: Boosts and Fixes

Calc – Lots of fixes, like faster scrolling on spreadsheets with many hidden columns, faster removal of duplicates, and Reject All in Track Changes was slow to complete, so that’s been optimised.
Graphics – Again, a lot more optimisation for many user cases, especially when exporting SVGs with bitmaps and importing certain SVGs (usually because of fills) and polygons (with tiled image fill) that were noticeably slow to render.
UI – for example, Go To Page / Slide / Sheet Dialogs are async now, which means the UI stays responsive when navigating large documents.

UI: New Context Menu option

Insert Hyperlink – Another new time-saver courtesy of the Context Menu, which works across all the core apps. This time, when you highlight text, and the Context Menu pops up automatically, you will find an ‘Inset Hyperlink’ as an option.

Filters: Improved Interoperability and Markdown

Markdown – Both Markdown export and import features are improved, and you can apply templates to imported Markdown, too, so your documents pick up the colour theme and formatting, for example.
Calc: Generic XML and JSON Tabular Mapping Support – Linkable tabular ranges are auto-mapped to sheets in Calc when opened now. A linkable range is a section of a document containing tabular records. When a document contains multiple linkable ranges, each range gets mapped to a single sheet.

There are many other commits from many people in LibreOffice 26.2, so while we are acknowledging the time and effort contributed by our engineering team here, we want to celebrate the collective contributions of everyone involved in the LibreOffice project.

“We are pleased that Collabora Productivity's business model of selling maintenance subscriptions has allowed us to contribute the majority of highlighted new features in this release cycle - alongside the community.”

—Michael Meeks, CEO of Collabora Productivity on LibreOffice 26.2

For a detailed document on Collabora Productivity’s contributions to LibreOffice 26.2 and the support we provide in areas such as crash-testing, security maintenance and interoperability, download the fact sheet (PDF).

We love to work in the open for the benefit of everyone and empower each user to control their documents!

If you’re new here, and you’re looking for a feature rich and compatible open source solution for editing and collaboration your users will love, try Collabora Online today!

The post Collabora Productivity contributions in LibreOffice 26.2 appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

DigitalPakt Schule 2.0: A once-in-a-decade opportunity to modernise digital learning

Richard Brock — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:36:06 +0000

Studies carried out in 2013, 2018, and then 2023 show that digital literacy within German schools has been in decline over the past 10 years. Existing approaches are not delivering the desired educational outcomes.

Germany’s next major investment in school digitalisation is taking shape. With DigitalPakt Schule 2.0, the German federal government and states have agreed a new, long-term programme to support schools backed by €5 billion in funding .

DigitalPakt 2.0 represents a rare opportunity to step back, reflect on what is working well – and what is not, and to build digital learning environments that are sustainable, interoperable, and future-proof.

What is DigitalPakt Schule 2.0?

DigitalPakt Schule 2.0 is the successor to Germany’s original DigitalPakt programme, jointly funded by the German federal government and the federal states. Public announcements from bodies such as the Kultusministerkonferenz (Ministers of Education) make clear that the next phase aims to go far beyond one-off hardware investments.

A consistent theme across official communications and press coverage is a stronger focus on long-term usability and maintenance, better integration between systems, and digital teaching and learning as an ongoing capability, not a one-time project.

In short – DigitalPakt 2.0 is not just about buying technology, but about building and securing future digital capacity.

Lessons learned from DigitalPakt 1.0

When the original DigitalPakt Schule (2019–24) was launched with billions in funding, the headline goal was clear: boost digital infrastructure and learning in schools. While much progress was made, a range of structural and practical issues emerged that provide useful context for how DigitalPakt 2.0 should be shaped – particularly around software and collaboration tools.

From the beginning of the project, critics flagged that Microsoft products were being bundled into school deals, pushing schools toward one particular proprietary ecosystem. While not officially mandated, these de facto defaults had the effect of limiting the consideration of less well-known alternatives that may offer stronger interoperability, improved security, lower long-term costs, or greater digital sovereignty.

Additional questions remained about training of teaching staff, highlighting the importance of using not only powerful, but intuitive, easy-to-learn software packages.

Perhaps most concerningly – studies carried out in 2013, 2018, and then 2023 (towards the end of the DigitalPakt 1.0 period) show that digital literacy within German schools has been in decline over the past 10 years, suggesting that existing approaches are not delivering the desired educational outcomes.

The real opportunity of DigitalPakt 2.0

Modern school IT environments are complex ecosystems. They typically include identity and access management, file storage and sharing, document creation and collaboration, learning platforms, and a wide variety of end-user devices. Issues emerge when procurement focuses primarily on immediate deployment, rather than on long-term effectiveness and integration across the wider system.

DigitalPakt 2.0 offers an opportunity to rethink the procurement approach in a more innovative, modular and sustainable way. While all-in-one platforms look great on paper, in reality, they limit the ability for administrators to select, replace, integrate new systems, or upgrade components independently. Rather than relying on monolithic, all-in-one platforms, schools and authorities can combine best-in-class tools, each focused on doing their job exceptionally well, provided they integrate cleanly and reliably.

When software providers focus on specialisation and strong integration, everyone benefits: schools gain flexibility, finance teams reduce long-term vendor lock-in risks, and system administrators benefit from simpler maintenance and clearer responsibilities. Most importantly, teachers and students gain tools that are better aligned with real-world teaching and learning workflows.

Building digital learning environments that last

DigitalPakt Schule 2.0 is a genuine opportunity to move beyond short-term digitisation projects, towards new solutions for schools, with better outcomes for students.

With powerful, modular architectures, and well-integrated specialist tools, schools and authorities can build systems that remain flexible, sovereign, and effective long after the funding period ends.

If you’re exploring how better collaborative document editing, or innovative teaching tools could fit into your DigitalPakt 2.0 plans, Collabora Online is designed to integrate cleanly into existing education IT environments.

If you’re planning a larger deployment, migration, evaluating options, or would like support designing a sustainable collaboration setup for schools or school authorities, get in touch with us. We’d love to help you explore how Collabora Online can support your DigitalPakt 2.0 goals.

The post DigitalPakt Schule 2.0: A once-in-a-decade opportunity to modernise digital learning appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

From Online to Desktop, Berlin to Bangkok – Here is how your support made a difference

Richard Brock — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:51:38 +0000

“As we come to the end of another extraordinary year, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our customers, partners, community and of course the awesome team at Collabora Productivity.

“We’re focused on making Open Source rock by creating beautiful, intuitive tools that work online and off, and keep you firmly in control. We love to work alongside a vibrant global community that believes productivity should be open, secure, and designed for users. We are most grateful to our partners and customers who ultimately fund every document we liberate and line of code we write – thank you!”

Michael Meeks
Collabora Productivity CEO

And what a year it’s been! We’ve shipped some of our most ambitious projects yet – from a beautiful new user interface refresh, to a brand-new desktop suite. We’ve grown in reach, thanks to partnerships with French ministries offering Collabora Online to 1,000,000+ teachers, or German states choosing open, sovereign productivity solutions they control and can trust, and it was the year we reached the end of support for Collabora Online 22.05, showing the strength of our LTS offering.

So let’s dive in and take a look at what your support made possible, starting with the headline release of the year: Collabora Online 25.04.

COOL 25.04

Collabora Online 25.04 was our biggest step forward in usability, performance and document rendering in years. This release wasn’t just about adding features – it was about making everyday work smoother, faster, and more intuitive for millions of users. Just a few highlights include:

Smoother, more polished editing

One of the less visible improvements was the work on performance. With updates such as viewport-based preloading aiming for a 60fps smooth editing experience, documents now feel noticeably more responsive. Scrolling and typing are snappier, zooming more fluid, and larger documents load with far less waiting around. A huge quality-of-life win.

Smarter writing tools: Autotext & Custom Dictionaries

Writer gained powerful new productivity helpers this year.

Autotext speeds up repetitive writing and helps teams standardise phrasing, while Custom Dictionaries make it easy to ensure technical terms, product names, or organisational jargon are treated correctly. Small features, big dividends for anyone who works with words all day.

Combined with central management capabilities, these are serious features for organisations big and small looking to level up their language use and consistency.

Clearer, easier collaboration with improved comments

Commenting saw significant enhancements too. Updates across the UI make discussions smoother, more reliable, and easier to follow – especially important in documents with multiple collaborators. These improvements continue our ongoing effort to make collaborative editing as simple as possible.

Modern PDF support and digital signing

The introduction of PDF 2.0 compatibility and built-in digital signatures thanks to an integration with eID Easy brought a major boost to organisations with modern document-signing needs. Users can now create, read and sign modern PDFs directly within Collabora Online – no more need to share your sensitive documents with 3rd party document signing companies.

A Presenter Console built for impressive presentations

Impress gained a fully-featured Presenter Console, giving speakers everything they need: upcoming slides, timers, notes, and navigation tools. Whether in the boardroom, classroom, or conference hall, Collabora Online now offers a far more complete presentation experience.

Improved Interoperability - The work that never stops

Alongside the headline features, COOL 25.04 continued our constant, meticulous work on interoperability. Hundreds of small fixes and refinements across Writer, Calc, and Impress to make sure documents open cleanly and behave as users expect – whether they are edited in our software, or shared with collaborators in a different editing environment.

COOL Days 2025 — A Bridge-Building Blast in Budapest

June brought the Collabora Online community back together for COOL Days 2025 in Budapest, where contributors, partners, developers and community members gathered for three days of talks, workshops, demos, fun and hacking.

The programme mixed technical deep dives with hands-on hacking time as well as some fun excursions around Budapest, allowing contributors, partners and engineers to all enjoy the time together. From sharing new features and performance improvements, debugging tricky issues or sharing feedback on roadmap directions, the in-person conversations and shared sessions proved invaluable.

If you couldn’t join us, you’ll find the full write-up, photos, and talks on our blog here. And we’re already looking forward to welcoming you to COOL Days 2026 in Hamburg!

Major UI/UX Refresh

This year we delivered our biggest UI/UX refresh yet. The simple aim was to use the data we’ve gathered to reduce friction, make powerful features more discoverable, and let users move faster with less training. Some of the updates include:

Context-aware design: controls when and where you need them

Selecting text now triggers a compact, contextual toolbar right next to your cursor – so common formatting tools (bold, italic, font, colour, etc.) are instantly available without hunting through menus.

Smart tabs

Instead of overwhelming toolbars, we introduced contextual tabs – for example, auto-switching to the Table tab when you’re editing a table, or the Picture tab when an image is selected.
This keeps the UI cleaner, less intimidating, and more relevant to the task at hand.

Cleaner layout, responsive toolbars, better discoverability

The UI now adapts gracefully to different window sizes: controls re-flow, related functions group when space is tight, and horizontal scrollbars are eliminated – giving a smooth, consistent experience, and improving function discoverability whether you’re on a compact screen or a large monitor.
We also improved iconography, and added more graphics for commonly used layout settings so all users can find the settings they need

Data-driven design – built from real usage patterns

This overhaul wasn’t guesswork. Behind the scenes, we collected feedback from customers, partners, community, and internal usage data: more than 1,000,000 data points from real editing sessions. The result? A UI shaped around how people actually work, balancing simplicity, power, and flexibility.

New Collabora Office

One of the most exciting moments of the year came right at the end: the launch of the new Collabora Office our desktop suite bringing Collabora Online to the desktop. For the first time, users can enjoy a genuinely consistent UI and feature experience across browser and desktop – the same fast engine, the same collaboration-ready foundations, the same modern UX direction – all wrapped in a beautifully polished native app.

Whilst only an initial release, we are looking forward to further integrating and supporting both worlds in 2026. Organisations can run Collabora Online in the browser, offering the desktop app for local work, and enjoy the same feature set, file handling and behaviour across platforms. This will dramatically reduce training overheads for Collabora Online users, will simplify deployments, and opens the door to a more unified future for productivity.

The new suite is already elegant and secure, but as we iron out the initial early-release hiccups, we’re exited for future development and deeper convergence in the years ahead.

If you haven’t read the full announcement yet, we highly recommend it – it’s one of the biggest steps we’ve taken in making open productivity seamless across every device.

Community

Collabora’s mission to “Make Open Source Rock” continues to thrive thanks to our incredible and diverse community. Every bug you reported, every string you translated, every patch you submitted and every insight you shared has helped make Collabora Online better for millions of users around the world. Thank you for being such a wonderful force behind our progress.

This year our community grew stronger than ever. We welcomed over 100 new contributors across code, translations and documentation. From first–time patch authors to long-time translators, you all reflect the healthy, global momentum of the project. We resolved 251 community-reported issues on github so far this year, showing how active collaboration continues to shape the roadmap. We also created 85 new Easy Hacks, and with 72 still open, there are plenty of approachable ways for newcomers to get involved.

Our translation community was equally impressive in 2025, reaching 92 supported languages, with more than 100 translators who completed 88,683 translated strings and nearly one million translated words. Two new languages joined this year as well, expanding accessibility for even more users.

Engineering

This year our engineering team delivered quality improvements across performance, usability and new features. With 4,486 commits merged into the master branch, 368 more than last year, and more than 300 customer tickets resolved, Collabora Online is evolving faster than ever.

Performance improvements also paid off. From the document parsing, caching and rendering improvements in the 25.04 release, we estimate to have dropped 2-3 seconds from document load times since 2024. For the same 500-user organisations, that might have shaved off 600-900 hours of document-loading time, or approximately 100 working days.

In our crash testing, this year in partnership with Adfinis, we supervised the loading of more than 30,000,000 test documents, resaving to different formats and checking for errors. In addition we maintained a huge number of code fuzzing tests, as of early December this was 2,798,607,405,444.

As well as crash testing, our thorough file-format-interoperability testing (which checks for errors when converting the ~250,000 problematic documents we keep on record) ran through more than 4,000,000 tests this year, with resulting interop improvements resolving in excess of 10,000 reported issues. In just two impactful updates of our XLS to XLSX conversion filter for example, over 13,000 previously misbehaving documents were fixed.

Combined with the refreshed UI/UX, performance and accessibility upgrades, and major new features in the 25.04 release, this year we took our engineering excellence to the next level.

Conferences

But not only fast-paced development, 2025 was a year of planes, trains and presentation clickers – with the team attending 25 conferences around the world. From the romantic streets of Paris, to bustling Tokyo, to busy, colourful Bangkok, we were thrilled to meet our partners, customers, developers and open-source enthusiasts wherever they were gathering.

We kicked off the year at the Univention Summit and FOSDEM, before heading into a spring packed with community events, cloud summits and developer meetups. Summer brought our own COOL Days in Budapest, shortly followed by the LibreOffice Conference also in Budapest, which our colleague Gábor Kelemen led the organisation of, helped by a team from Collabora Productivity and members of the local community.

Autumn carried the momentum through Copenhagen and The Hague, before a snowstorm of events in December. Wherever we travelled, the message was the same: organisations everywhere are looking for beautiful, smart, secure, sovereign office solutions – and they’re genuinely excited to discover what Collabora Online can offer.

We hope to see you at one of next year’s events – and especially at COOL Days 2026 in Hamburg!

Marketing Stats

2025 was also a big year for marketing and outreach, with our blogs, videos, social media and press activity reaching a wider audience than ever. We also launched French, German and Spanish translations of our website to help even more organisations learn about open, secure, sovereign document editing. Here are some of the highlights:

2025 saw us kick off a new #FeatureFriday video series, to introduce new features of Collabora Online. One of the more popular videos in the series featured some of the collaborative features in Collabora Online: Collaboration Features in Collabora Online #FeatureFriday.

2025 also saw our new Open Matters podcast introduced, exploring open source news and topics. Why not have a listen here to our December episode exploring some of the history, struggles and progress of open source projects in Denmark: Open Source for Citizens: Denmark’s Bold Experiment.

Press coverage grew dramatically in 2025, with 178 articles and blog posts published by year’s end — up sharply from 59 mentions in 2024 — reflecting both increased momentum and rising recognition of Collabora Productivity’s role in open, sovereign digital infrastructure. November, marked by the launch of Collabora Office, was a particular highlight: in just one week, the announcement generated 36 articles, including coverage from Heise, MSN and ZDNet (which was localised and syndicated across multiple countries with a recently updated title “Not enough people are talking about this free Microsoft Office alternative”) Overall sentiment was strongly positive at 87%, and we expect coverage to continue growing as further updates land.

This year we also hosted a number of webinars outlining our product lineup, new features, integrations with our partners, and of course the new Collabora Office.

Speaking of which, our new Collabora Office release blog attracted some serious attention in November, you can read more about that here.

And finally, our new comic, “The Open Road to Freedom” (or TORF for short), took a more light-hearted look at the world of FLOSS software communities.

New Integrations, Partners & Team

2025 saw growth not just in users and deployments, but in people, partnerships and the wider ecosystem around Collabora Online.

Our team grew by 24 new colleagues, including 13 former allotropia team members and 4 interns, strengthening our engineering, design and community efforts. Behind those hires sat a remarkable level of interest: 3,669 applications, 73 interviews, and a recruitment pipeline driven largely by the open-source community itself – 36% via community channels. A clear sign that people want to work on open, meaningful technology, many thanks to all who applied even if we couldn’t host everyone (yet).

At the same time, our ecosystem continued to expand. We welcomed 34 new partners this year, including more than 15 OEMs and deep integrations, spanning hosting providers, collaboration platforms, consultancies and sovereign cloud offerings across Europe and beyond.

We also saw a broadening integration landscape, with new and ongoing work around WordPress, Odoo, Imixs and Plone (only Odoo and WordPress are supported by us currently), making it easier than ever to use Collabora Online wherever documents are created and shared.

Collabora Productivity is growing, and so is the opportunity to be part of it! If you’re looking to integrate, partner, or deploy, there’s never been a better time to get involved.

Thank you for joining us on this whirlwind tour of 2025! It has been a year of big releases, bold UI changes, deep technical improvements, and major wins for open standards and digital freedom around the world. Thank you again to our customers, partners, community contributors, testers, translators, and everyone who helps push Collabora Office and Collabora Online forward.

If you want to stay connected or get more involved, here are a few easy ways to dive in:

Try CODE and experiment with the very latest Collabora Online features
Download the new Collabora Office desktop and see just how far it’s come
Join the community forum, and maybe try out some easy hacks!
Subscribe to our newsletter for monthly updates
Follow us on social media for releases, deep dives, and behind-the-scenes posts
Reach out to sales if you’d like to integrate Collabora Online or join our partner ecosystem

We’re excited for everything 2026 will bring – and we can’t wait to keep building an open, secure, user-focused future together.

But for now, from all of us at Collabora Productivity marketing,

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year!

The post From Online to Desktop, Berlin to Bangkok – Here is how your support made a difference appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Collabora Online now available on Desktop

Richard Brock — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 09:36:07 +0000

Same look. Same code.
Your files, your device.

We’re excited to share the first release of the new Collabora Office for desktop – bringing the familiar, powerful Collabora Online experience, to run locally on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Open it and feel instantly at home: ODF or DOCX, quick edits or deep dives, a clean, beautiful interface that helps you get work done without getting in the way.

Like Collabora Online, but on your desktop

This isn’t only a look-alike. Collabora Office Desktop shares the same code DNA as Collabora Online. All the power of one is contained in the other, and what you learn in one transfers to the other. That means fewer surprises, fewer workarounds, and a smoother path from solo editing to team collaboration.

One codebase in your browser, tablet, mobile, Chromebook and now desktop too
Shared rendering engine: the same real-time rendering technology
HTML + JavaScript-based front end, powered by your system’s native browser engine (like WebKit, Chromium, etc.)
Synchronised updates: bug fixes, UI improvements, and new features can be rolled out to all platforms in parallel
Based on the LibreOffice core technology under the hood for excellent standards-based compatibility

So whether you’re editing a spreadsheet offline on the train in Collabora Office Desktop, or later collaborating with your team online – it’s the same experience, just in a different wrapper.

Compare That to Microsoft Office…

To see why this matters, let’s look at Microsoft’s suite:

Microsoft 365 for web (O365) runs in your browser and is largely built in JavaScript, using a dramatically simplified, stripped-down feature set for web collaboration, assisted by a server-side Office in some cases.

Microsoft Office 2024 (desktop) is a legacy-rich C++-based application with a completely different architecture, behaviour, and sometimes even different rendering quirks.

Result: differences in UI, performance, feature sets, even how documents behave between web and desktop.

In contrast, Collabora Office Desktop and Collabora Online are one and the same – meaning:

No feature fragmentation
No interface learning curve
No training complexity of “it works online but not offline”
No duplication of engineering effort
No recommendations to “use the desktop version”
Just one clean, modern, open-source office suite – anywhere you need it

Word Excel
Accessed 2025/11/21

Instantly productive, no learning curve

Collabora Office Desktop is built to feel like home from the moment you open it. If you’ve used Collabora Online, you’ll be right at ease: a calm, consistent interface that lets you focus on the work, not the software.

Consistent, easily discoverable UI with intuitive toolbars and tabbed interface
Great Document interoperability. ODF or OOXML, we want to work your way, not the reverse
No retraining required. Open, edit, and go
Work with local files directly. No cloud required
Print with native system dialogs and your existing printers
Use platform-specific shortcuts and controls you already know

Whether you’re writing a report, crunching numbers, or building a presentation, Collabora Office Desktop will get it done.

Privacy by design

Collabora Office Desktop is open source and offline-first. Your documents stay on your device unless you choose to share them – full stop. It’s productivity that respects your data, your processes, and your digital sovereignty.

Fully open source: no hidden executables, no spyware
Your documents never leave your device unless you say so
Cross-platform: available on Windows, macOS, and Linux

This is productivity software that respects your freedom.

Collabora Office Desktop vs. Collabora Office Classic

We love LibreOffice. We are privileged to be the largest code contributors to the codebase, Collabora employs several founders of The Document Foundation, and many of the top committers. We offer a Long Term supported product based on LibreOffice, branded as Collabora Office Classic, and are deeply grateful for and acknowledge many skilled community contributors we work alongside, as well as the incredible range of features that LibreOffice code enables.

Collabora Office for desktop’s initial release is not (yet) enterprise supported, but we encourage our customers and partners to evaluate it for deployment in 2026 and to provide feedback.

If you need tools like the Base database module (including Java-based components) or the full Math module, Classic remains the right choice – Collabora Office isn’t trying to replicate those. Collabora Office will run macros, but for advanced macro authoring and debugging you should use Classic. . For extreme Calc workloads (think complex Solver models or analysis across hundreds of thousands of rows) Classic is likely the better fit.

Where Collabora Office differs, it does so deliberately: no Java dependency, which means a smaller, cleaner install, less baggage on startup, and a single, self-contained download. Collabora Office also focuses on a streamlined, modern UI that highlights the tools most people use every day, while Classic offers an extraordinary level of power, extensibility and configurability.

In summary – the aim with Collabora Office and Collabora Online is simple: intuitive, fast, and focused – a beautiful desktop office suite offering the workflows most professionals use every day to create, edit, and collaborate, online and offline.

Collabora Office Desktop	Collabora Office Classic
Fresh, modern UX	Classic, established UX
Javascript & CSS UI to match Collabora Online	VCL-based classic UI
Simpler settings / streamlined defaults	Very extensive options, menus & dialogs
No Java	Java used for some features/wizards/DB drivers
No built-in Base app	Includes Base UI
Runs macros	Full macro editor & advanced BASIC/Python/UNO
Modern web tech (Canvas, WebGL, CSS)	Custom toolkit (VCL)
Fast to iterate (edit JS, fewer recompiles)	Core/C++ changes typically require recompiles
Initial release – Enterprise Support is coming	Long term Enterprise Supported (Collabora Office Classic)
Quick-Start guides	Extensive manuals & books

*A Note on Early Releases

				
					<early-release status="exciting" vibe="optimistic">
    
<text:h text:level="1">This is just the beginning...</text:h>
    
<text:p>This release is a <b>first step</b>, not a final destination. There will be bugs. Performance may vary. Features are still being polished. Translation may be patchy. But this is also your chance to get a preview of where we’re headed, and to help shape where we are going.</text:p>

<text:p>Try it out! Share it with your friends, share your feedback with us, and get involved in development! Find out more about the growing Collabora Office community in the link below. If you have Javascript, CSS, C++, testing, translation or documentation skills - and love working with others to change the world – get involved!</text:p>

</early-release>

Try Collabora Office Desktop Today!

Help Us Build the Future

We’re excited to share this preview with the community – and we’re counting on your feedback and contributions to make it even better. We hope you enjoy the new Collabora Office.

Together, we’re building a privacy-respecting, open, and elegant office suite for everyone.

Join the webinar

Join the webinar on the 3rd December to find out about the new Collabora Office, and how it fits into our ecosystem!

The post Collabora Online now available on Desktop appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

A Brief History of File Formats: DOC vs DOCX vs ODF…

Richard Brock — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 12:17:57 +0000

Save As?

TL;DR
When you click “Save As” in your favourite word processor, you probably don’t think too much about the file format. Yet file formats like .doc, .docx, and .odt shape how we create and share documents—but they can also create headaches. Here’s a quick guide to their history, differences, and why Collabora Online makes working across them easier.

From Closed and Binary, To Open and Extensible

The earliest digital files were of course just plain text – a simple sequence of characters, and no formatting. Writers used to all the flexibility of pen and paper however quickly wanted more: bold headings, paragraph spacing, indents, embedded images, at this point the list is almost endless. This led to the evolution of file formats storing much more than the mere ‘text’ of a file. Binary formats such as WordStar “Document” files (introduced 1978 – interestingly WordStar files had no official file extension, files were either “Documents” with formatting, or “Nondocuments” pure ASCII text files), or Microsoft’s .doc (1983) took over the word-processing space. Compact and efficient for older systems, binary formats also locked users into specific software, making it difficult to share documents across platforms.

Above: What’s going on under the hood?! The same document saved 3 ways

By the 1990s, Microsoft Word dominated the market, cementing .doc as the “default” document format worldwide.

The next big shift came with XML-based formats – more verbose, but human-readable and compressible. The open-source community were the first to develop the Open Document Format (ODF) in 2005, designed to prioritise openness, readability, and extensibility. Microsoft soon followed suit with their own OOXML files such as .docx in 2007, while ODF continued as the ISO-standardised alternative.

Whereas binary .doc files were proprietary containers that embedded program-specific data structures directly, ODF and .docx files are zip archives full of multiple XML and media files, making them easier to parse, extend, and standardise than their opaque binary predecessors. You can think of .doc as a box not only locked, but also containing pages of Egyptian hieroglyphs – only Microsoft held the key and translation documentation, and they were unwilling to share. ODF files (and largely .docx*) on the other hand are transparent zip files written in your language. You can open them, inspect the contents, and tweak them as much as you like.

*Reality check on OOXML

There’s no smoking gun that .docx was engineered to be opaque. However, OOXML’s sheer breadth, the long-standing default use of the “Transitional” profile, and historical standardisation controversies have raised questions and interoperability costs for alternative suites putting a question mark over some of the claims to being an ‘open’ format.

In practice, this means that while .docx is technically an open standard, third-party developers often face hurdles when trying to implement full compatibility.

Don’t change formats while editing?

For open standards and long-term access, ODF (.odt, .ods, .odp) is ideal. As an interesting case study, and illustrating the benefits, many governments now mandate the use of open file formats as the “standard for use across government”.

There are many reasons for this, but they essentially boil down to making sure you have full control over your documents – and avoiding the technical and financial dangers associated with proprietary technology. Essentially if you are relying entirely on one proprietary company for your file format standards, document editing software, and perhaps even cloud storage, it could be argued you’re asking for vendor lock-in problems, with future migration or even simple access becoming costly.

Legacy proprietary formats (such as .doc or .rtf) which are no longer actively developed should be avoided. In the future, if not already, they will be increasingly difficult to work with (have you tried to preserve formatting while opening Microsoft Works .wps or .xlr file in a modern document editor recently?).

The elephant in the room is what to do with .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files. As proprietary formats, they carry the same long-term risks as .doc or .wps – future deprecation, compatibility gaps, or costly migration. Yet in a world dominated by Microsoft, ignoring them would be impractical. The safest approach today is to continue using these modern proprietary formats (without conversion) with existing files, but to prefer open formats (ODF) for creating new content. This strategy minimises the danger of future lock-in and preserves your freedom to move documents between systems without technical or financial obstacles.

What about Document Editors?

*Note: Not all document editors are created equal! Microsoft’s modern formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) dominate in business, so you need to work with them, but their quirks can still cause issues, even within Microsoft’s own product range.

This all means you need a document editor that is as comfortable working with .docx as it is .odt., .pptx or .odf. The good news is Collabora Online natively opens, edits, and saves all major formats, both Microsoft’s and ODF, so you can edit and collaborate freely without conversion headaches.

ODF formats (.odt, .ods, .odp) are ISO-standardised, open, and widely supported – making them the safest bet for long-term storage and interoperability.
If you’re exchanging documents predominantly with Microsoft Office users, then .docx, .xlsx, or .pptx may be more practical. Those formats are the default in Microsoft’s ecosystem, and choosing them avoids confusion when sending files back and forth.*
Legacy binary formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .rtf) should be avoided for new work — they’re deprecated and increasingly unreliable.

The takeaway? File formats will keep evolving, but you don’t have to get stuck in the past or tied to a single vendor.

Collabora Online does a better job of handling Microsoft formats than Microsoft does of handling ODF. That means if you stick to ODF in Collabora Online, your documents will remain open, future-proof, and feature-complete – but if you need to share in Microsoft formats, we’re ok with that too, and provide high-quality export options that preserves your work.

The Best of Both Worlds

Get the best of both worlds with Collabora Online!

Try Collabora Online today and experience smooth, format-agnostic collaboration.

File Format Summary

*Collabora Online does a better job of handling Microsoft formats than Microsoft does of handling ODF.

Name / Type	Extension(s)	Purpose / Usage	Software Used to Access	Notes
Plain Text	`.txt`	Minimal files containing only raw characters	Any text editor (Notepad, Vim, etc.)	Universally readable, but no formatting
Microsoft Word (legacy/proprietary)	`.doc`	Word processing (1983–2007)	Document editors with legacy import filters (Collabora Online, Microsoft Word…)	Proprietary, binary format. Difficult for other apps to fully support
Microsoft Word (modern/proprietary)	`.docx`	Word processing (2007–today)	Microsoft Word, Collabora Online, Google Docs	Based on OOXML. Technically “open,” but complex and not always perfectly interoperable (even within Microsoft offerings)
OpenDocument Text	`.odt`	Word processing (ISO standard since 2005)	Collabora Online, Microsoft Word*	Fully open, great for long-term use
Microsoft Excel (legacy/proprietary)	`.xls`	Spreadsheets (1987–2007)	Document editors with legacy import filters (Collabora Online, Microsoft Word…)	Proprietary, binary format. Difficult for other apps to fully support
Microsoft Excel (modern/proprietary)	`.xlsx`	Spreadsheets (2007–today)	Microsoft Excel, Collabora Online, Google Sheets	Based on OOXML. Technically “open,” but complex and not always perfectly interoperable (even within Microsoft offerings)
OpenDocument Spreadsheet	`.ods`	Spreadsheets (ISO standard since 2005)	Collabora Online, Microsoft Excel*	Fully open, great for long-term use
Microsoft PowerPoint (legacy)	`.ppt`	Presentations (1985-2007)	Document editors with legacy import filters (Collabora Online, Microsoft Word…)	Proprietary, binary format. Difficult for other apps to fully support
Microsoft PowerPoint (modern/proprietary)	`.pptx`	Presentations (2007-today)	Microsoft PowerPoint, Collabora Online, Google Slides	Based on OOXML. Technically “open,” but complex and not always perfectly interoperable (even within Microsoft offerings)
OpenDocument Presentation	`.odp`	Presentations (ISO standard since 2005)	Collabora Online, Microsoft PowerPoint*	Fully open, great for long-term use
Portable Document Format	`.pdf`	Fixed-layout format for sharing/printing	Adobe Acrobat, browsers, Collabora Online (e.g. PDF signing feature)	Excellent for publishing, not for editing
Rich Text Format	`.rtf`	Interchangeable text format (1987–2008)	Collabora Online, Microsoft Word, WordPad	Once popular for compatibility, now deprecated

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