Latest Collabora Online version is awesome!

[marcusquinn]

When I started with Cloudron, Collabora was a HTML5 streaming app version of LibreOffice, so had all sorts of rendering issues and speed — so OnlyOffice became our preferred.

But — wow — just tried Collabora again — and it's like Google Docs — but private and better! Layouts render faultlessly from Office docs and to PDFs.

Free and decent on mobile too — whereas OnlyOffice wants an enterprise license for that (nothing against them having a freemium business model of course, given they are clearly open-source leaders in many ways too).

Just saying, for anyone else that had written it off or not tried it in a while.

Well done team Cloudron for giving us these options. World class open-sourcery magic! @girish @ @nebulon

[girish]

Oh wow, it's come a long way. We use onlyoffice internally, time to try out collabora!

[humptydumpty]

It took me 10 mins to figure out it's called CODE in the app store

[jdaviescoates]

I wonder if people like @avatar1024 (who I think has been primarily using Collabora for a good while now) have also noticed a speed improvement?

My understanding was that Collabora does (or at least used to do) lots of stuff on the server instead of the client, making it inherently slower. Is that still the case? Or, better, is it of comparable/ similar/ faster/ speed to OnlyOffice?

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty Ahh, just seen that — it was called Collabora the many moons ago we installed it.

[marcusquinn]

@jdaviescoates I think that was how the old version worked. This looks like a completely new native webapp.

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn you could be right, but I'm thinking it quite likely still works the same way, but just has a much better UX now.

In the end, I don't care how it actually works if it's just as fast as OnlyOffice.

The mobile editing makes it very appealing.

I was running both OnlyOffice and Collabora for a while and it kinda sorta worked but somehow ended in a muddle so I went back to just using OnlyOffice, but may be time to give Collabora a spin again.

[marcusquinn]

@jdaviescoates It was easy to tell in the older version that it was html5 streaming, you just resized the window very quickly and the rendering couldn't keep up. This version I'm confident is full-on lean vectors. Proof is in the pudding though, so lemme know what your feel for it is.

[fbartels]

@marcusquinn that sounds like the webassembly changes of LibreOffice were merged to Collabora

• https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lotech_lowa/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356020

[timconsidine]

@marcusquinn thanks for this. I'm one of those that had not bothered with it much.

One question, maybe for @staff : can CODE be used standalone ? Or with something other than Nextcloud ?
Nextcloud has served well, but not my primary tool any more.

[marcusquinn]

@timconsidine I guess if you can find another app that uses it, it's just accessing content via GET urls and POST data as far as I can see.

[jdaviescoates]

@timconsidine there are numerous integrations, here's the integrations menu items on their website https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/

See also all these partners:

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/partners-main/partners/

Looks like these are the main ones:

[timconsidine]

@jdaviescoates oooh Seafile !

[avatar1024]

@jdaviescoates Yes I still use mainly Collabora with Nextcloud and I have noticed tremendous improvements, especially since NC and Collabora have worked together to improve the integration.
However, I wouldn't say it is still quite like Google doc, or quite as fast as OnlyOffice. I tired OnlyOffice when I installed CryptPad and something about it feels more responsive than Collabora due to client rendering. It is basically just like editing on a desktop and Collabora is not quite there...but pretty close. Also we can feel that both Gdocs and OnlyOffice were designed as a collaborative editing tool whereas Collabora somewhat inherits the LO single user approach and tries to adapt it for collaboration and the result still does not feel quite as sleek....but here again it is getting much better than it used to be.
I can say that Collabora does not suffer from issues from the past, does not feel laggy and is perfectly fast enough to use while not feeling it's slow or weird. Also I do think it provides the most complete online office suit in terms of functionalities, and the best if you using open document formats.