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 as “an extraordinary collaborative document editorand – and does well against these when comparing features.”
