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Thank You for Everything We Achieved Together in 2022 🤝
At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team in cooperation with our worldwide network of partners and the community. Luckily, the year 2022 was less dominated by the global pandemic. Throughout the year, international travelling became easier and in-person events and conferences became much more common again. However, the world kept being shaken. The Russian assault on Ukraine emphasized once again the massive importance of digital sovereignty, as Michael Meeks pointed out in several of his talks, like his Digital Sovereignty talk at the SFScon22.
Collabora held the first in-person COOL Days 2022 in Berlin, which brought together partners, the team, and the community. Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen major performance improvements and increased functionality. We released the new major release of our flagship product Collabora Online 22.05, including performance boosts and impressing new features. Thank you for your support! Let’s take a look at what we have achieved together this year. 💜
Collabora Online 22.05: New Features and Better Performance 📈
With the release of version 22.05, Collabora Online reached new heights in performance, interoperability and usability. Many exciting features that had earlier been implemented and fine-tuned inside CODE 22.05, have been introduced this month.
Collabora Online 22.05 Brings Grammar Checking, Giant Spreadsheets and Performance Wins
- August 2022, major release 22.05 introducing LanguageTool grammar and style checks, “Jumbo” spreadsheets, Sparklines, WebP support, Content Controls (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and much more…
- September 2022, support for a new platform: ppc64le, the OpenPOWER architecture, UI tweaks and translation updates
- October 2022, detection of missing fonts, in place neural machine translation with DeepL, (sponsored by Adfinis) export of Content Controls to functional PDF forms
- November 2022, playback of embedded videos in Impress, faster tile compression with zstd, new context menu items of cells in Calc
CODE 22.05 Cutting-Edge Features and Path to a Rock-Solid Enterprise Version 💪
The latest major release of the Collabora Online Development Edition CODE 22.05 was released in June. Versions of CODE always appear in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online. The Development Edition contains all new features which are extensively tested before being incorporated into the Enterprise version. An overview of CODE releases for the year 2022 can be found in the release notes. You can find the conversations about CODE on social media, by searching for the hashtag #cool_dev on Mastodon or Twitter.
More Groundbreaking Major Releases: Collabora Online 21.11✌️
The Year 2022 saw two major releases. In January, we released the enterprise version 21.11 of Collabora Online. It included a complete redesign of the sidebar, enhancing its responsiveness and had a strong focus on performance enhancements.
Collabora Online 21.11 Including a New Sidebar, RTL Support and Performance Boosts
- January 2022, major release 21.11 introducing a quicker, “native” sidebar, right-to-left support, Calc-Excel compatible formulae and improved PPTX import
- March 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.2 including Accessibility Checker, faster rotation of bitmap graphics, and an improved UX
- April 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.3, dynamic configuration of multiple hosts and improvements for complex commenting cases
- May 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.4, toggling between Compact View and Tabbed View now available through the user interface, several functions added to the UI’s
- June 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.5, support of emphasis animations (spin, grow, shrink) in SVG presentation engine of Collabora Online Impress
- August 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.6, many fixes added including the zoom factors in the glow and soft edge effects and the CSV import dialog
- October 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.7, fixed selection of candidates for Japanese IME input, UI for adding print ranges in Calc, and override CheckFileInfo
- October 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.8 several fixes like the SVG export of text fields, a memory leak related to the remote config feature, UI fixes
Powerful New Features for Collabora Office on the Desktop 🖥️
Collabora Office 22.05 Continues Enhancing Productivity and Interoperability
May 2022 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 like spreadsheets with 16,000 columns, sparklines to Calc (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and saw linked paragraph and character styles arrive in Writer. The new features developed by Collabora are now also available in LibreOffice 7.4. Collabora Office for Windows is available through the Microsoft Store. The latest version for macOS can be bought from the App Store. Furthermore, we are encouraging you to help us test the latest features inside our unstable snapshots.
Further updates throughout the year included additional features & improvements:
- September 2022, Collabora Office 22.05.6 including chart data tables, document themes in Impress, and content controls in Writer
- November 2022, Collabora Office 22.05.8 new Content Control features (combo box, titles, tags) PDF export of the content controls mapped to PDF forms
Collabora Office 21.06 Saw Updates and Improvements
- February 2022, Collabora Office 21.06.15: Addition of preferred DPI document setting and many interoperability fixes
- April 2022, Collabora Office 21.06.24: Improved precision of PDF image sizes on export, record sort command in macros
- May 2022, Collabora Office 21.06.29: Code stability and security fixes
- September 2022, Collabora Office 21.06.33: SVG export enhancements
Numerous Fixes & Updates for Collabora Office 6.4
Moreover, the Collabora Office 6.4 branch saw numerous updates, mostly including fixes and performance and interoperability improvements. You can find these changes documented inside the release notes.
Many new Features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱
Collabora Office Brings Powerful Office Productivity to Your Pocket
This year saw a major update of Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS including numerous advanced productivity features, excellent document compatibility and a much improved user experience. The first major release to version 21.11 included performance improvements, a faster & responsive toolbar on tablets, enhanced contextual Toolbars, better shadow effects and much more.
- April 2022, Collabora Office 21.11.3 for Android, iOS & Chrome OS – major release including Contextual toolbars, improved PPTX import, blurry shadows, soft edges for objects
- August 2022, Collabora Office 21.11.6 for Android, iOS & Chrome OS – improved user experience and fixes
Amazing News, Interesting Figures 📈
280 Partners Worldwide
In 2022, our large network of amazing partners kept growing. We can now rely on over 280 partners from more than 50 countries. We help each other to promote open source, privacy & digital sovereign solutions and re-invest the proceeds into creating great new software. Find a Collabora partner in a special field or area, or become a partner yourself!
Collabora’s Contributions to LibreOffice 7.3 and 7.4
Collabora is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice technology. Our developers are responsible for many commits to the LibreOffice core. Thanks to the sponsorship of our clients, we were able to introduce many new features and improvements to LibreOffice 7.3 and LibreOffice 7.4. The LibreOffice 7.3 release saw many performance focused enhancements (increased PDF export speed of some complex documents, faster loading of large RTL documents and insertion of large charts, rendering improvements in the Skia-based rendering backend and introduction of a Skia-based rendering backend on macOS). We also introduced numerous new features and interoperability improvements to LibreOffice 7.4. This version saw the arrival of native rich text and checkbox content controls support from Word, remote LanguageTool grammar checking, support for sparklines (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and the use of 16384 columns in Calc and support for WebP images. Find more technical background on some of our contributions inside this blog. More great stuff is going to arrive in LibreOffice 7.5. We appreciate any help in testing. You’ll find the latest features in a Collabora Office snapshot or a pre-released Dev-Version of LibreOffice.
Collabora Online Community Contributions #cool_dev 📈
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, 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. Of course, we added new documentations to the SDK this year for new features like the DeepL Translator (sponsored by Adfinis) or the LanguageTool Grammar Checker.
Starting at a Distance, Coming together in Person Again 🤝
The beginning of the year 2022 was still heavily impacted by the global pandemic. Major events like FOSDEM 2022 or the FOSSASIA Summit 2022 took place as remote events. Others had been rescheduled to a later date, like the Univention Summit. Luckily, throughout the year, travelling became easier again, and many conferences, such as the LibreOffice Conference in Milan, and the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin, could take place in person again. In October, we held our own COOL Days in Berlin – for the first time as an in-person meeting with the Collabora team, community and our partners.
COOL Days 2022 in Berlin
This year, for the first time ever, we were able to host the COOL Days as an in-person event. The three-day event focused exclusively on topics related to Collabora Online – and on some fun and team building experiences. Read the wrap-up of our activities from the community day, the partner day and the tech day on our blog. All the recordings of the talk from the Tech Day can be found on our playlist on YouTube, many slides can be found inside our repository on GitHub. The next COOL Days are coming very soon… Join us in Cambridge in March 2023!
COOL Days 2022 Impressions
COOL Days 2022 Videos
FOSDEM 2022 – A Massive Remote Experience
Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like 2022 – FOSDEM is one of the major gatherings for Open-Source developers. The Collabora team held several talks on Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Find the all videos of our talks in our FOSDEM 2022 playlist and all the slides in our blog.
Collabora at the LibreOffice Conference in Milan
This year’s LibreOffice Conference was held in Milan and saw many talks by the Collabora team. All the recordings are available in our YouTube playlist and the slides can be downloaded from our blog.
News by Collabora Directly into your Inbox 📨
Keep up to date with our public newsletter. If you would like to receive regular updates like this one on the news on Collabora Online, Collabora Office and future COOL Days events, please sign up to our newsletter.
Summary
It has been a very busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We have enjoyed seeing the Collabora Online Community grow and keep on advancing our mission to make open-source rock. We continued giving users privacy and businesses control over their data. We managed to achieve excellent results, and had a good time working on them – despite some challenging conditions that persisted in 2022. The Berlin edition of COOL Days was one of the highlights for us this year. We have big plans for 2023, some of them unfolding already in early spring! 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!
