Collabora Online Developer Edition 4.0 is here: edit documents on mobile and more!

Today, Collabora Productivity has made a release candidate for version 4.0 of CODE available. This includes the exciting improvements that enable Collabora to be integrated in the Nextcloud mobile apps, as well as several other improvements we worked on with Collabora to deliver to our users. We’ll provide an overview of what is new below, with some screenshots!

Major improvements

The improvements to Collabora Online in this release are spread over three main areas:

• Mobile and high resolution display support
• Document signing
• LibreOffice 6.0 upgrade

We worked with Collabora on the first point, with design improvements and deeper integration in Nextcloud and making it possible to edit documents in our mobile apps. This resulted in a more modern look and support for our sidebar while editing documents as shown in this image:

You see the new toolbar there, which has a new design, shows the last modification of the document and lets you change the name in-line. A hide menu bar icon is also there to just show the toolbar while you’re editing.

Not visible is the new shape editing menu, and the updated shape resizing process which shows you a preview of the new shape rather than a blue outline.

Mobile editing

Collabora Online is now integrated in the Nextcloud mobile clients. Collabora Online 4.0 does the loading, layout and other heavy computations on the server, saving battery life on mobile devices. The toolbars have been overhauled, now auto-hiding and able to scroll and adapt to deeper hierarchies on small screens.
Zooming with your fingers (pinch-to-zoom) works and large dialogues can also be displayed, letting you pan and zoom where needed.

An example of these improvements is the special character dialog, allowing users to find and insert various signs.

High DPI display support

Mobile devices like tablets as well as many modern laptops have very high resolution displays. Until now the browser would take care of zooming, making interface elements look pixelated and unsharp. With this release comes support for high resolution rendering on the server, also using scalable icons.

Other improvements

Other improvements include a lot of performance and security work, improved thumbnailing and updated translations.

This version also allows you to add images from Nextcloud directly into Collabora and other improvements we already talked about last month.

Versions in the sidebar

Editing a document

Inserting an image from Nextcloud

Just yesterday we published version 5.0 of Nextcloud Talk and 3.4 of our Android Files app, which combined with CODE 4.0 make all these features available to you!

Vereign blockchain signing integration

Collabora Online Developer Edition 4.0 introduces another main feature: document authentication with qualified electronic signatures (under Eu and Swiss law). Users can sign up with the Vereign beta program to test this out, after enabling it in the configuration file, they can use File → Sign document to activate the toolbar and log in. This technology supports storing and publishing copies of signed documents, protected by the blockchain.

Collabora Office 6.0 improvements

The LibreOffice 6.0 release provides the foundations for Collabora Online 6.0 and with it come many improvements across the applications, from performance to extensive compatibility enhancements. For details on this, see this page.

If you want to get started with online document editing in Nextcloud, see this page on our website.