At Collabora Online we say don’t redevelop the wheel, integrate it!
The temptation is real, modern browser technologies offer such a rich baseline of functionality why wouldn’t you consider developing your own editor? Rich text editors are abundant, collaborative frameworks exist and the fundamental problems of saving, formatting and typing have all been solved! Ask yourself what are you missing?
The reality is office suites are amongst the most complex software categories created, what appears to be basic text editing belies a depth of interconnected systems all requiring years of development and refinement. We’re going to take a look at how hard a problem the office suite is to crack and how you can avoid burning through development budgets by quickly deploying a Collabora Online integration, we have hundreds of satisfied customers and millions of users!
Choose two? Fast, Good, Cheap
Classical project management simply doesn’t apply here, with literally dozens of critical interconnected systems to juggle, the idea that you can still stick to the choice of fast and cheap developing things yourself goes up in smoke.
Consider the scope of what a basic enterprise office suite would need to offer its users. Even the first feature of file interoperability, being able to open a multitude of industry standard file formats correctly and render them with near flawless results is a monumental task, that even Microsoft and Google struggle with, nevermind this opening functionality list:
A Simplified Picture
Document Interoperability
Class-leading rendering across formats
Real-time Collaboration
Conflict resolution, operational transforms
Performance at Scale
Memory efficiency, algorithmic optimisation
Security and Compliance
Multi-layered protection, audit trails, certifications, documentation
Internationalisation
30+ languages, Right to Left support, locale handling, complex text
Accessibility
Screen readers, keyboard navigation, high-contrast options
Platform Support
Multi-browser, mobile options, off-line
Format Interoperability
DOCX, ODT, legacy formats
Extensibility
APIs, plugin architecture, customisation
Deployment Flexibility
On-premise, cloud, hybrid
Long-term Support
Maintenance, updates, migration paths
Developer Experience
Documentation, ease of integration, ease of hiring
Printing
page-layout, pagination, paper management etc.
How to Simplify this Office Complexity
It’s the interaction across many of these areas that causes unexpected development issues. A change to the text rendering engine impacts the collaboration system, which affects the user interface, which requires updates to the format export logic. This isn’t just unfortunate complexity, it’s inherent to the problem. As the feature set progresses it requires evermore complex changes to the quickly growing codebase – did you know LibreOffice uses over 6 million lines of code?
This in turn demands more specialisation from your development teams that now have to handle the intricacies of font rendering, the advanced mathematics of spreadsheet calculations and dependency graphs, understanding document layout requirements, real-time collaboration engines, text hyphenation across dozens of languages and so many more super niche but critical areas.
It doesn’t get better, those web browsers that you thought made life easier actually bring a maintenance burden all of their own. Constant software updates for security and API reasons demand updates to rendering code and input handling – did we mention even copy and paste is hard? That’s besides keeping on top of file formats changes, supporting a range of varying devices and the ever moving target of security and the enticing attack surface your office suite now provides!
Why Reinvent this Wheel?
Integrating Collabora Online instantly delivers an entire ecosystem – from advanced text rendering and multi-language support to sophisticated collaboration engines and format parsers – without the years of development risk or massive engineering investment that amounts to millions of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of translated strings.
Instead of building all the complex subsystems visualised here, focus your team on your core product. Collabora Online delivers enterprise-grade document editing capabilities that would otherwise require a dedicated team of specialists. Don’t build it, integrate it and innovate where it matters!
Integration is quick, affordable and good!
Integration offers a fundamentally different return on investment. Instead of years of development risk, you get immediate access to proven, tested, production-ready capabilities. Instead of hiring specialised talent for non-core functionality, you leverage decades of accumulated expertise. Instead of ongoing maintenance burden, you get continuous updates and improvements from teams whose core mission is office suite excellence.
Integrate Collabora Online today to empower your users with powerful document editing capabilities within your own platform.
Buy Collabora Online
Official supported stable version with tested updates, security fixes and improvements.
Install CODE & Try It Out
Collabora Online Development Edition can be set up On-Premise via virtual appliance, Docker, Linux package, etc.
