At Clare College, Cambridge, Neil Mohr catches up with the Collabora Online team to discover what’s state of the art in the online office world.

Image credit: Getty Images/Stone/Peter Cade

When LibreOffice was first released back in 2011, the writing was already on the wall – applications were moving online. More to the point, the world of the office was moving online. It wasn’t even a case of when, it was already happening, with Google Docs having been around in beta since 2006 and Google Drive about to be launched, along with Microsoft Office 365 moving to a full public beta all around this time.

So, as lovely as it was that the open source world had a fully featured offline office suite in the form of LibreOffice backed by The Document Foundation, which would go on to do sterling work pushing for governments to adopt open document formats, if the world was demanding and using online services, someone with the free software philosophy was going to have to bring digital sovereignty to our online documents and help free those, too.

So it was that Collabora Online aka COOL (www.collaboraoffice.com) was launched by a brave band of developers, including longstanding Linux Format contributor Michael Meeks, who is also a long-time Gnome, Novelle, SUSE, OpenOffice and LibreOffice developer, and is currently general manager at Collabora Productivity. He graciously invited us to attend the recent COOL Days conference at Clare College, Cambridge, to find out about the latest developments of Collabora Online and its many partners…

Back in LXF288, Michael Meeks described Collabora Online as “an extraordinary collaborative document editor you can host yourself on-premise and deliver to any modern browser from mobile to desktop. Combined with a suitable document storage, it provides a real alternative to G-Suite and Microsoft Office Online – and does well against these when comparing features.”

This goes some way to explain its features and requirements, which are useful to understand before you try it out. Our guide (see boxout, page 93) on trying COOL pairs it with Nextcloud, which provides the interface, web server, storage and database for it to function. Collabora Online uses the LibreOfficeKit API, which enables the reuse of the existing LibreOffice Core C++ code to load, save, edit and render documents as image tiles, with a JavaScript/NodeJS front-end that handles the interface and renders the document. It means the existing LibreOffice code can stay as is, with supported features exposed via the API.