Partners Archives - 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.

COOL Days 2025: A Bridge-Building Blast in Budapest

Richard Brock — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 07:04:48 +0000

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.

Castles, Cruises & Café Vibes

We kicked off with a guided e-scooter tour through the Castle District – effortlessly gliding past historic landmarks, soaking in panoramic views, and learning about the rich history of the city from expert guides. With truly beautiful weather, it was the perfect, low-effort way to explore Budapest in style as the sun went down (and no cardio required!).

Tuesday evening saw us swapping wheels for a Danube river cruise, where we enjoyed drinks on the deck, before a delicious dinner gliding through Budapest’s glowing riverside – golden-hour light bouncing off the water, the city’s architecture putting on a show, and good vibes all around.

And for our final night? A cosy takeover of the Lumen Café – a unique indoor/outdoor space complete with amazing food, free-flowing drinks, and the kind of relaxed atmosphere where great conversations (and a few questionable quiz answers) thrive. We also had some amusing group activities: bridge-building challenges for our new company beaver mascot, pictionary battles, and a challenging quiz (did you know the first webcam was a camera trained on a coffee pot to see if it was full?!).

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.

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What We Achieved Together in 2024

Richard Brock — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 15:53:53 +0000

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.

Collabora Online 24.04

A glimpse at what’s been added!

Our flagship product, Collabora Online saw big improvements in 2024, introducing many exciting new features with a big focus on performance, working to bring the best, snappiest, collaborative document-editing experience. Just to name a few of this year’s developments…

3D Transitions

Bringing some excitement and pop to your presentations, Collabora Online now has 3D transition support. We’re working hard to keep you looking your best!

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.

There are of course so many more Collabora Online improvements that we have not listed here, like the nested comments, improved pivot tables, or “@ing” users in comments, our release notes page is a not-insignificant corpus with more than 250 lines of updates and improvements this year, but for a short round-up, this taster will have to suffice!

Online and Offline
Enterprise and Community

Collabora Office 24.04

Not long after the Collabora Online major release, our offline desktop app Collabora Office brought enjoyed its own major update as Collabora Office 24.04. You can read more about the updates here.

CODE 24.04

The latest major update to Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) was released shortly before Collabora Online in April. CODE releases always appears in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online.

Mobile Apps

Released in September, and building on the the foundations of Collabora Online and Office, our popular apps for android and iOS have been powering mobile work throughout 2024!

Collabora Online Controller

For our largest deployments, 2024 marked the launch of the Collabora Online Controller (COOL Controller), based on Kubernetes, designed to take management of 100,000+ user deployments to the next level offering ease of use, and cost savings.

Our new COOL Controller is an exciting addition to Collabora Online, which will streamline and bring significant savings to large deployments, maximising server resource usage and efficiency, minimising running costs, and simplifying the real-time monitoring of your Collabora Online document editing solution.

Despite being released only this year, the COOL Controlled is already powering hundreds of thousands of users’ Collabora Online deployments!

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!

openDesk

This October, we were excited to attend the Smart Country Convention in Berlin as part of the openDesk platform, where one of the standout moments of the event was the launch of openDesk 1.0 – an initiative that aims to transform public administration through open-source solutions and shared resources.

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.

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!

LibreOffice Community

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

LibreOffice 24.2 and 24.8 saw many improvements from the team at Collabora – we’ve listed below some of the commits from the Collabora team this year….

LibreOffice 24.2

Bringing Collabora Online to the World

Richard Brock — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 15:58:49 +0000

With partners and users around the world, Collabora Online is a global solution, allowing any and all to take control of their documents and data. In December alone, we attended three international conferences, in two continents – the Open Source Experience (OSXP) in Paris, the Nextcloud Enterprise Day also in Paris, and the LibreOffice Latinoamérica conference in Montevideo, Uruguay.

NextCloud Enterprise Day

Starting with the Nextcloud Enterprise Day, it was a delight as always to join our close partner Nextcloud. As the force behind their incredibly popular Nextcloud Office document editor we shared the latest updates to Collabora Online such as automatic document creation and the newest features in our apps. As Nextcloud’s French Marketing Team shared with us last year, the French market for secure and open-source solutions is rapidly growing, and we are excited to be helping enterprises in taking back control of their software and data.

Open Source Experience

Following on from the Nextcloud Enterprise Day, we remained in Paris for the highly popular OSXP – an event dedicated to open-source IT solutions. OSXP report that, “In 2022, the open-source market in France was €6 billion, representing 11% of the global digital market. This growth is sustainable, and has increased 40-fold in less than 20 years.”

Sharing a popular stand with one of our French partners Arawa, many government and business leaders came to speak with us about digital sovereignty, GDPR compliance, and how Collabora Online is helping or could help them achieve their data-security goals. Of particular interest to conference attendees was the fully-attended round-table seminar, Why Pay for Free Software, hosted by Collabora Productivity CEO, Michael Meeks. Bringing together four other open-source CEOs (Frank Karlitschek – Nextcloud GmbH , Philippe Hemmel – Arawa , Anais Concepcion – Grist , Amandine Le Pape – Element / Matrix), the discussion centred on how open-source businesses operate, bringing fully-featured, fully-supported products to the market.

LibreOffice Latinoamérica

Finally, we enjoyed meeting up with many from the LibreOffice community, at the auditorium “Espacio Colabora” Montevideo, Uruguay. Eliana Dominguez welcomed all attendees, particularly the local open-source community, with talks about open document standards, data security, statistics, export/import, use of software.

We shared a presentation about the overall design of the Collabora Online web server, forks of the LibreofficeKit process, the use of the WOPI host (Nextcloud partner) and WOPI client (coolwsd), how to scale the service with a load balanced server, a how-to guide on compiling the source code, and how to configure a simple development document or download our packages from our site.

We love meeting our end users and the wider developer community. Additionally it is a great joy to be working with so many partners globally, striving together in freeing documents and systems. We believe this openness, both in code and attitude, is one of the many reasons so many now rely on Collabora Online for their collaborative document-editing needs.

Find out more about how we can help you here:

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Empowering Education with Collabora Online: A Case Study

Richard Brock — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 14:25:48 +0000

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During the global pandemic, the Friedrich-List-Gemeinschaftsschule in Mössingen, Germany, seamlessly embraced the challenge of transitioning to online learning. Throughout this process, privacy, reliability, and accessibility were held up, with an open-source strategy leveraging Collabora Online as a vital component of their educational toolkit.

“It simply works. And it is reliable. That is crucial for us. In combination with Nextcloud, it works wonderfully and is very performant.”
– David Binder, teacher and IT officer

Embracing Open Source for Education

The Friedrich-List-Gemeinschaftsschule has long been an advocate for open-source solutions, fostering an environment where students are prepared not only for academic challenges but also for the demands of a rapidly evolving digital world. With a robust IT infrastructure based on free software, including Linux clients and LibreOffice, the school was well-positioned to address the sudden shift to online education triggered by the global pandemic.

Reliability and Security as Key Factors

What sets Collabora Online apart for the Friedrich-List-Gemeinschaftsschule is its reliability and security. With approximately 70 teachers and 600 students actively using the platform, Collabora Online has seamlessly become part of the school’s everyday workflow. The software’s integration into the existing infrastructure, coupled with its commitment to data and document security, has provided the school with a reliable and privacy-conscious solution for online collaboration.

Collabora Online for Educational Empowerment

In an educational landscape where flexibility, reliability, and privacy are paramount, Collabora Online stands out as a tool that empowers both educators and students. Its usage at Friedrich-List-Gemeinschaftsschule showcases the adaptability of Collabora Online in addressing the unique challenges of modern education. As institutions continue to navigate the complexities of online learning, Collabora Online proves to be a reliable and secure solution, contributing to the evolution of education in the digital age.

Download the Full Case Study

Explore the full details of how Collabora Online enhances secure collaboration within educational institutions. Dive into the full white paper to uncover the benefits and insights.

Case Study

“Open Source helps students learn from home during lockdown”

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