It is interesting to see Euro-Office launched, with Nextcloud in charge. We would like to provide some initial thoughts here to address people’s questions.

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; let’s 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.

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

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

				
					<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>
				
			

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.

What a Difference 3 Years Makes

TL;DR
Collabora Online 22.05 has reached end-of-support. In the three years since it was released, we’ve shipped 11,780 commits across the suite, including most recently a major UI/UX refresh (contextual toolbars, smart tabs, responsive toolbars, presenter controls, iconised menus). If you’re still on 22.05, now’s the time to upgrade to enjoy a smoother, more powerful, more familiar, more accessible Collabora Online.

Collabora Online 22.05 has served teams well, but all good releases eventually hand over the baton. End‑of‑support means no more fixes or security updates will be coming for that line. Your documents will still open of course – but you won’t enjoy any further updates or the polish we’ve added to the suite since.

The 22.05 release introduced features like support for external grammar checking in the browser, “jumbo spreadsheets” with up to 16,384 columns, Sparklines in Calc, WebP image import across apps, Content Controls in Writer for better DOCX compatibility, and a new Accessibility Checker. We also laid foundations for bandwidth and CPU performance wins with smarter tile updates.

Since then however we’ve done even more to improve the Collabora Online experience for everyone.

See All the Updates in 25.04!

A UI/UX that reduces friction

The modern Collabora Online interface prioritises discoverability and familiarity. Contextual tabs surface relevant tools only when you need them. An on‑selection formatting popup brings common actions within thumb‑reach. A responsive toolbar groups intelligently instead of forcing horizontal scrollbars. And a tidier, more useful Navigation Sidebar keeps find/replace and document structure together. Just a few of the latest features you’ll enjoy on upgrading.

Performance that you can feel

We can’t possibly list all the performance updates over the past three years in one paragraph, but notable recent updates include a reworked client‑side rendering engine to be smarter about when to draw, to batch DOM changes, and to free memory more aggressively. Large documents, 4K displays, and scrolling workloads will feel smoother and more consistent. Upgrade to try it out!

Collaboration, reviewing & authoring

Upgrades to comments (thread clarity, @mentions, quicker shortcuts), Styles Spotlight in Writer for auditing and standardising formatting across a document, hyphenation control for layout fidelity, named ranges improvements and focus cell highlighting in Calc, plus tools like duplicate record handling for faster data cleaning.

Security & compliance improvements

Beyond patches, recent security updates include Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) support with eID Easy, PDF 2.0 support, and hiding server signature settings to avoid advertising exact versions. Admins also get better WOPI troubleshooting, and a comment‑only mode for stricter review workflows.

The post 11,780 Commits Later: The Journey from 22.05 to 25.04! appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

From Monday 2nd to Wednesday 4th June, our annual COOL Days conference brought the Collabora Online community together in beautiful Budapest, and we’re still buzzing from it! Hosted at the stylish Mövenpick Hotel, this year’s event was packed with engaging talks, unforgettable team-building, and plenty of laughs – not to mention a new company mascot who stole the show.

Talks, Tech & 74 Ways We’re Growing

Beyond the team building activities, COOL Days 2025 was a powerhouse of ideas and collaboration. We…

• Celebrated our growth over the past year and shared plans for the exciting road ahead.
• Unveiled upcoming features from the soon-to-launch Collabora Online 25.04 release – stay tuned!
• Showcased the work of our team and wider community through an incredible 59 lightning talks.
• Dug deep in 15 workshops, panels, and keynotes, covering everything from product integration to community engagement.
• And hosted dedicated partner workshops, where we listened as our valued partners shared their hopes for the future roadmap, and explored how we can work even better together to serve end-users.

 

The energy and knowledge shared across those three days was inspiring. The dedication, creativity, and passion from everyone involved is what makes COOL Days so… well, cool.

Watch Tuesday's Talks

Watch Wednesday's Talks

Until Next Year!

Thanks to everyone who helped make COOL Days 2025 such a vibrant, energising event – our wonderful partners who keep the ideas flowing, the inspiring lightning talkers making the magic happen, and everyone else involved. We’ve scattered a few photos throughout this post to give you a flavour of the fun, and we’re already looking forward to what the next year will bring.

The post COOL Days 2025: A Bridge-Building Blast in Budapest appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

The Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) is Europe’s largest network of companies and organisations developing, building and using Open Source software. Today they released their outstanding guide on how to buy Open Source Software (German, English). Why is that important? It is easy to read. A cut out and keep companion that helpfully explains the realities of Open Source to someone new to the field. In particular – it addresses the special attention required when acquiring the competent support you need.

With proprietary software it is generally safe to assume that a company’s ability to compile or brand a version of the software implies their ability to support it. With Open Source however, it is important to assess this claim by examining the company’s deeper contributions to the underlying projects, since any developer can follow the steps to compile the software.

Collabora Productivity is pleased to have contributed, alongside some outstanding partners, at the OSBA to these extremely helpful guidelines and criteria aimed at helping public administration make informed decisions as they tender for, and buy Open Source solutions. It is pleasing too to see the LibreOffice developer certification programme recognized here as a blueprint. Such certifications allow Open Source projects to easily contribute towards making procurement easier. By flagging competence in fixing and improving the software based on proven, peer-reviewed code changes, procurement can help drive re-investment back into improving the code-bases that we all depend upon.

By incorporating the steps outlines in the OSBA paper, procurement buyers will more easily realise their goals of digital sovereignty, and ensure successful Open Source deployments supported by competent suppliers, positively contribute to the sustainability of their chosen Open Source software projects.

Read the full OSBA position paper here (German, English), or get in contact with us to find out how we can help you!

The post Buying Open Source Safely appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Going into the second decade of our life, we are enjoying the fruits of many years’ hard work, quality partnerships, wonderful customers, and continual improvement. 2024 was a year of great achievement – product enhancements, partnership milestones, new training opportunities, new partnerships, and of course our unwavering commitment to open-source excellence. Let’s take a moment to celebrate some of the year’s achievements and look forward to the challenges ahead.

Section Editing and Cell Protection

Inspired by a number of our customers, including a French government ministry – we implemented the ability to lock and protect data within spreadsheets. This exciting new feature empowers users to exert greater control over their spreadsheets and collaborate more effectively than ever before.

In a similar vein, we made sections in Writer editable within Collabora Online, allowing you more flexibility with your formatting and the ability to write-protect or hide parts of a documents.

Follow the Editor

We had ‘follow the editor’ functionality for some time in our offering, but this received a new lease of life in 24.04 with a more intuitive interface. Especially useful for conference calls or meetings, enabling all users to follow the note taker without any input required, or to catch up to a location in a document being referred to by another user.

Change Processing

To speed up reviewing of tracked changes, two new buttons have been added to the user interface – ‘Accept and Move to Next’, and ‘Reject and Move to Next’. Combining two functions into one, greatly improves and expedites the processing of tracked changes.

Server Audit

Bringing rapid assistance to Collabora Online employments, you can now immediately troubleshoot your server setup, with quick links to our SDK for fixes and improvements.

Calc Tooltips

No more trouble trying to remember the order of VLOOKUP variables, with a tooltip popup, we give you all the information you need.

Searchable help

Making help more helpful! Quickly browse our online help, or keyboard shortcuts to keep moving!

Auto align/ruler bar

With the new snap-align for images and ruler bar, positioning and aligning content is effortless, allowing users to create visually appealing, well-structured slides.

Present in Window

Choose to share a presentation window while video conferencing, and continue using the rest of your screen for presentation notes, meeting minutes, and viewing video conference attendees. Focus on both audience and content without awkward interruptions or toggling between views.

Interactive Elements

Bringing a whole new level of engagement to presentations, this functionality allows users to set custom actions for images and other presentation elements, such as moving to a specific slide, playing audio, running a program or macro, or simply exiting the presentation from the current slide. Transform your demos, workshops and training sessions into dynamic experiences.

Quicker Comments

Speeding up the editing process greatly, you may add comments into your documents with just two clicks. Right click > ‘Insert Comment’. To keep things moving then hit Ctrl + Enter to save your comment. 

Halving load times

Cutting page load times by as much as 50%, we not carry out more processes in parallel. This leads to noticeably snappier document opening for end users.

Background Autosave

Auto-saving can now be carried out in the background. No longer will you or other users have their editing frequently interrupted by an unexpected ‘Saving’ notification. Sometimes it’s the little things that count!

18x Speed

~18x Speed Boost

This speed-boost stacked two improvement, associated with optimising the rendering and re-rendering process of tiles, and changing the way the threading of this process is handled. These wins compound up to an 18x speed increase in this process of identifying pixels requiring re-rendering!

Automatic Documents

We introduced a new API to read and populate fields in documents without the need to open the document. This means that fields can either be automatically detected and extracted from a document for an end user to fill in, or multiple documents can be quickly created and filled from a database. Similar to a mail merge for email, but with far more power and flexibility, this new API will streamline document creation or form filling across a variety of use cases.

Support

Our customers have access to a support platform and direct contact with engineers. In 2024, we received 890 support tickets, of which 97.5% have already been resolved. We’ve been working very hard this year to give our customers the best support experience possible!

New Integrations

This year we have introduced 2 new integrations which you can now connect with Collabora Online. You can find out more about all the Collabora Online integrators here. We have exciting plans for 2025 already, bringing Collabora Online to more of the places you’re working. 

ILIAS is an Open Source web-based Learning Management System (LMS) that provides a integrated e-learning platform that can be adapted to suit various educational and professional settings, making it a flexible and powerful tool for online learning and knowledge sharing. Features include course management, learning modules, tests and assessments, portfolios, surveys, wikis and blogs for an all-in-one e-learning solution.

Drupal is used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. It has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security, and it is used by many different companies in several industries – from government and healthcare institutions, to the retail sector and non-profit organizations. With one simple module, Drupal users can now collaboratively edit, view and share text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings.

New Partners

This year we have welcomed 29 new partners from around the world, many of which are integrating Collabora Online into their applications and providing their customers with a collaborative document editor alongside their other features. We love to partner with like-minded companies to build a fully-featured solution for their customers, allowing more and more users to take control of their data.

1. Xebia
2. Stylez
3. inxire GmbH
4. HumHub
5. OpenKM
6. Librebit
7. WISE
8. Marsh Web Solutions
9. Qualiwise
10. Qast Software Group
11. Pinguin-systeme
12. KTS
13. Flexcloud SAS
14. LoadFront
15. Nevermind
16. Octopuce
17. SPAOS
18. OAK Solutions Inc
19. Scope IT Consulting
20. Circularo
21. PULSE Innovations GmbH
22. Premier Learning Institute
23. ADMIN INTELLIGENCE GmbH
24. Open Circle AG
25. Dinova
26. REDS CLOUD
27. Open Social BV
28. RCA Systems
29. Consolidate Software

Above: Some of the more than 200 partners we currently work with. You can find out more about Collabora Online partners here. 

As well as welcoming new partners, we were also pleased to celebrate ten years of fruitful partnership with Adfinis. You can learn more about our shared journeys here.

New Team

We’re excited to being developing further as a company with new staff joining us throughout the year. This year, we had new staff joining all areas of the business, from marketing to managing, PAs to programming. You can find out more about our current vacancies, and working for Collabora Productivity here. 

Events

This year, we attended nearly 20 conferences around the world, as conference attendees, booth presenters, lightning talkers, round table MCs and keynote speakers. Most recently, we enjoyed being part of the the Open Source Experience (OSXP) and Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Paris, as well as the LibreOffice Latinoamérica conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. We love being able too meet partners, customers and community, receiving valuable feedback and sharing open-source goodness with the world!

COOL Days 2024

It was a pleasure to host so many friends at our annual COOL Days meet up in Cambridge this year. Giving partners, developers, product managers and marketeers the opportunity to exchange ideas face to face led to many excellent discussions, and it is always a great encouragement for us to spend time together with so many like minded people. Why not have a look at our video summary, which gives you a taste of our incredible time there!

Join us in Budapest!

Join us at COOL Days 2025 in Budapest!

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Collabora Online Community Contributions #cool_dev

Collabora’s mission to “Make Open Source Rock” has been an ongoing success thanks in part to our amazing diverse community. So, thank you for fixing that bug, translating those missing strings and reporting back with precious insight!

New this year, hosted by Collabora Productivity, our Friday afternoon ‘Tea Time Trainings’ have helped many with more technical talks aimed both at giving back to the community, and sharing our knowledge with each other. Catch up on the talks here!

Why not join the discussions in our forum, our community calls every Thursday at 12pm CEST, tea time training every Friday at 13pm CEST, translate strings on Weblate, file bug reports or feature requests on GitHub and spread the word on Collabora Online!

Marketing

The Collabora Productivity marketing team has had a busy year promoting open-source goodness both at offline events and online on our shiny new website, blog posts, videos, and social media accounts (follow us here!)

Github Linkedin Youtube Twitter Mastodon Facebook Instagram

The most popular content of the year was of course that related to our major annual release, but other more popular content included our involvement in the openDesk 1.0 release, our white papers such as the one outlining the benefits Collabora Online brings to a workplace, or case studies such as our new partnership with the team at OpenText Filr.

Alongside this, our restarted #FeatureFriday playlist amassed over 1,000 views this year, helping users get the most out of Collabora Online. You can view some of the videos below, or see the whole playlist here.

#FeatureFriday

Present in Window

Conditional Formatting

Pivot Tables

Sparklines

Rounding Up...

All in all, it’s been an excellent year for document freedom, digital sovereignty, and development at Collabora Productivity. Before we close with a comment from our CEO, on behalf of the marketing team and all the staff at Collabora Productivity, we’d like to wish everyone in our community a very joyful Christmas, and a happy new year!

“Reading here I was amazed that we had achieved so much together in just one year, thanks to everyone, particularly our partners and community contributors, that have helped to support our growth and work to liberate people’s documents.”

Michael Meeks

Collabora Productivity CEO

The post What We Achieved Together in 2024 appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

The partnership between Collabora Productivity and Adfinis began 10 years ago with a shared commitment to open-source principles and a vision to serve end users with open-source solutions. Reflecting on the past decade we are greatly encouraged by all that we have achieved, with the support and encouragement from Nicolas and the Adfinis team developing an enterprise-ready, browser-based, open-source document editor.

The decision to join forces in 2014 was an easy one, Adfinis staff were involved from a very early stage of the LibreOffice project, contributing to strategic work such as the translation of pre-existing German code comments to English, expanding the pool of talent able to work on the code and accelerating further development. Since we joined forces, we have also enjoyed hosting Adfinis at annual Partner conference multiple times in Albania, Berlin, and Rome, speaking together at the Adfinis organised LibreOffice conference in Bern, and working together bringing open-source goodness to companies around the world.

In particular, by directly helping to fund and contributing to critical projects, Adfinis has helped Collabora bring to the market a powerful, fully-featured, privacy-respecting alternative to proprietary office suites. Adfinis helped to support Collabora’s development of our powerful document-editing app for the iOS platform, and we’ve tackled other ambitious projects together, such as integrating the powerful tools LanguageTool and DeepL into Collabora Online(read more about these projects from Adfinis here ), and together now support thousands of users and organisations in the freeing of their documents.

Thanks to Adfinis’ ongoing generous donation of testing hardware, we now run crash testing on 850,000 test documents – importing and exporting the documents in a constant loop on our latest code. This lets us detect many format regressions, before they reach even our development edition release, a key part of helping to make each new Collabora Online release stable and secure. These achievements, and many ongoing customer success stories underscore our commitment to bridging open technology across proprietary domains, promoting digital self-determination, and fostering ambition and a can-do attitude in IT solutions.

Looking ahead, the collaboration between Collabora Productivity and Adfinis (amongst other organisations) remains pivotal in driving exciting new initiatives like the openDesk project forward, and with now a decade of milestones behind us, continues to grow stronger as we eagerly anticipate the next chapter of innovation and partnership.

To Adfinis, we say thank you for being part of our story these past ten years. Thank you for the encouragement, enthustiastic support at the beginning of LibreOffice, for serving alongside Collabora members on the TDF board, and for contributing to the project both financially and technically. Your support and friendship means a huge amount to us, and it is a great privilege working together with you.

The post 10 Years of Partnership with Adfinis appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Thank You for Everything We Achieved Together in 2023

At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team alongside our worldwide network of partners and the community. 2023 was a particularly significant year for us as we celebrated ten years of Collabora Productivity, adding another productive decade to our mission of bringing document editing and trillions of existing documents into the free world!

In March we held another successful COOL Days conference, this time in Cambridge, which brought together our team, partners and the community. We are looking forward to another great event in April 2024 – join us!

As well as our own events, our team also attended over ten locations to present talks, meet partners and share Collabora Online with the wider community. You can keep up to date with our adventures on our events page.

2023 saw many organisations and users throwing off their proprietary shackles, and embracing the freedom open-source solutions bring. In particular, we saw many educational institutions reconsidering their relationship with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace amid privacy concerns, great strides being taken by local and national governments such as the openDesk project in Germany, and increasing numbers of private companies taking back control of their document storage and editing needs.

Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen performance improvements and increased functionality. In July, we released the new major release of our flagship product Collabora Online 23.05, which included increased interoperability, performance boosts and a whole range of new features and accessibility improvements. Thank you for your support! Let’s take a deeper dive into what we have achieved together this year.

Collabora Online 22.05 → 23.05

Our flagship product, Collabora Online saw marked improvements in 2023, introducing many exciting new features and a big focus on accessibility, working to bring the best digital experience we can to all our users, regardless of their abilities or challenges.

• February 2023: Zotero plug in, PDF and EPUB export options, insert page number dialog, Duden Corrector plugin, easy hyperlink pop up editor
• March 2023: linking API, improved conditional formatting from XLSX files.
• April 2023: interoperability improvements.
• July 2023: major release 23.05 introducing dark mode, expanded keyboard shortcuts, initial screen reading support, document themes, multi-page floating tables and accessibility improvements.
• August 2023: further updates to keyboard shortcuts and more performance improvements.
• September 2023: new font previews and barcode/QR code functionality.
• October & November 2023: a focus on polishing and bug fixing with over 70 improvements.
• December 2023: STYLEREF, floating tables properties, re-designed PostMessage for integrators and developers.

See the full release notes for Collabora Online 23.05 and COOL 22.05.

CODE: Developing a Rock-Solid Enterprise Version

The latest major release of the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) 23.05 was released in June. CODE always appears in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online – the Development Edition contains all new features which are extensively tested before becoming available in the Enterprise version (COOL). An overview of CODE releases for 2023 can be found in the release notes but will mostly mirror those of Collabora Online. You can find the conversations about CODE on social media, by searching for the hashtag #cool_dev on Mastodon or Twitter.

Powerful New Features for Collabora Office on the Desktop

August 2023 saw the latest major release of Collabora Office, our long term supported desktop Office Suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release brought a number of powerful productivity features focusing on accessibility and improving user experience. The new features contain code that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. Collabora Office for Windows is available through the Microsoft Store. The latest version for macOS can be bought from the App Store. We also appreciate those who help us test the latest features inside our unstable snapshots.

• August 2023: major release of Collabora Office 23.05 including dark mode, interoperability features, document themes, 64-bit zip support, advanced editing features for tables and forms and so much more!
• September 2023: MS Office interoperability improvements including further support of document themes, floating tables and pivot tables.
• December 2023: Collabora Office 23.05.6 – STYLEREF, floating tables properties and advanced header and footer functionality.

Many new Features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS

Our major release for mobile and tablet devices in September 2023 brought more of the functionality from Collabora Online into the pockets of our users, as well as improving the current user experience and making navigating on smaller screens easier. Now you can use dark mode, improved form controls in Writer, Sparklines, consistent dialogs and a better UX for users on smaller screened devices.

Events

COOL Days 2023 took place in Cambridge, with more than 50 participants joining from our team, partners and the community. We presented 45 lightning talks showcasing our talented developers’ work across the year, held workshops and discussions with our partners about the importance of data protection in Europe, shared our development roadmap, and further discussed how to mutually support our sales and marketing efforts as part of our partnership. The community dived into a LibreOffice Hackfest and of course we had a great time socialising and team building around historic Cambridge.

As well as our own annual conference, our team attended events across Europe presenting talks, meeting partners and sharing Collabora Online, as well as presenting a keynote at the LibreOffice Conference for Latin America in Mexico.

2023 Events

LibreOffice Community & Contributions to 7.5 and 7.6

Collabora Productivity is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice technology. We are the largest contributor to the LibreOffice codebase, with our developers contributing many commits to the LibreOffice core.

LibreOffice 7.5 and LibreOffice 7.6 saw many improvements from the team at Collabora – here is just a snapshot of some of the commits this year.

• Content controls – added plain text type, combo box, PDF export, titles and tags. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
• Impress now supports cropped video for media shapes. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
• Citation handling: added plumbing in Writer to build Zotero-like functionality. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
• Keyboard navigation through forms (Justin Luth, Collabora)
• Replacing strings with numbers in Calc tdf#126109 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
• Find and replace in very large Calc sheets tdf#150749 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
• Added page number wizard in Insert menu for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer tdf#86630 (Paris Oplopoios / Justin Luth, Collabora)
• Initial machine translation is available, backend by DeepL translate (Mert Tumer, Collabora) core commit e20d2, tdf#34058
• Added pivot table compact layout. core commit 2f8d1 (Dennis Francis, Collabora)
• Display soft breaks as line breaks at fontwork. tdf#148000 (Attila Szűcs, Collabora)
• Added support to open multi image tiff files tdf#155444 (Rashesh Padia, Collabora)
• Auto fitting text scaling algorithm has been changed so it works similar to MS Office. (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora)

Of course, we also had many of our developers share their work in the LibreOffice Technology devroom at FOSDEM this year. You can find links to their talks and slides in our blog.

Partners

This year we have welcomed 20 new partners from across Europe, Australia and South America including Oodrive, Salesframe, Aridhia and unodata. We are very happy to have a growing partner network allowing more and more users to take control of their data.

Team

This year we have seen our team grow, adding another 17 people to our core team at Collabora Productivity within our Sales, Marketing and Technical teams, with 50% of these coming from the Collabora Online Community. We love to hire smart people who have contributed to the Open Source community. This allows us to provide a richer experience for our partners and customers.

Collabora Online Community Contributions

The Collabora Online Community kept growing and helped to improve the software through their commits, feedback, and translations. You can see from the stats above that our Community is doing great things! You too, can help to make Collabora Online better. Join the discussions in our forum, join our community calls every Thursday at 12pm CET, translate strings on Weblate, file bug reports or feature requests on GitHub and spread the word on Collabora Online!

The Collabora Online SDK

The Collabora Online SDK describes the main methods that allow you to interact with different Collabora Online components. Find installation guides, frequently asked questions, Post Message API and documentation on exiting integrations and on how to create new ones. This year we continued to add to our information to enable better integrations and clearer guidance.

A small sample of some 2023 updates:

• A repository with simple examples on how to integrate Collabora Online using different technologies.
• New architecture page.
• Lots of new Kubernetes documentation.
• PostMessage API for Mentions.
• Linking API.

Thanks to all who helped out!

It has been an exciting year here at Collabora Productivity, and we are so grateful to everyone who has been involved in 2023, and indeed for the past ten years – customers, partners, staff, and the community. We couldn’t have achieved any of these things without everyone working together so well. We have big plans for 2024 and are anticipating an even more exciting year ahead. We look forward to sharing it with you!

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to download Collabora Online. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank You!

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The post Thank you for a great 2023! appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.