Collabora Online demo servers provide fast and easy user access

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With interest in Collabora Online growing fast, more and more people want an easy way to play with the software before setting it up themselves at-home, on-premise or from a hosting partner. We expect some of hosting partners to use this too as an easy way to show-case their locally hosted server solutions.

We are always looking into ways to make setup easier, and we are now happy to announce the availability of demo servers from Nextcloud’s Collabora Online (richdocuments) App! We are grateful to work side by side with Nextcloud to deliver this to their users, and will be working with our other partners to integrate similar functionality in due course.

Demo user: choose a server and agree to experiment

Users of the demo servers must agree to the terms of service upon first use, as well as after each product update. Clearly these are not for production use – we recommend our hosting partners for real, hosted production use. We remind users that their documents are stored (temporarily, while open for editing) on the demo servers of Collabora or on those of one of our partners. This clearly contrasts with an on-premise solution where you can keep all of your documents on your own site as well as controlling performance and networking. Collabora Online really is the ideal solution for using your own servers for securely working on documents online.

With these demo servers, users may experience mixed performance, depending on the number of users using the service, but of course we can use that same usage-data in order to further optimize product performance. Users are not asked for any personal data (email address, etc.).

Sysadmins information

To activate the new demo-server feature, just two clicks of the sysadmin are enough to allow users to choose to connect to a server with a fully functional version of Collabora Online. This option is, of course, available on the administration page of the Collabora Online App.

Solving connection issues

We’ve seen reports of connection problems, caused by an incorrect/out of date configuration. The solution (in short): /hosting/capabilities/ endpoint should be readable (the reverse proxy setup in use is out of date)! You can find the necessary info on our pages for Setting up Nginx .. and Setting up Apache .. reverse proxy.

(Interested in discussion and background info? Pls read here.)

For partners, in cooperation with partners

We encourage our partners to help us provide demo servers in their local geography, and add them to our list to broadcast the benefits of their local provision of Collabora Online to a wider circle.

If you would like to integrate this with your solution – please checkout the server list (JSON). Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or ideas.

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