Michael Meeks

Come hear about a new approach to enabling browser deployment of rich Office functionality - built on top of allotropia's investment in enabling the core LibreOffice technology to compile to Web Assembly (WASM) - combined with the Collabora Online front-end. Hear about how this can be used to provide a fall-back (non-collaborative) editing mode for when you loose your network connection for a while, and about the plans to re-synchronize documents on the return from such a tunnel.

Come and hear how Collabora Online (COOL) has improved over the COVID19 era, not only in core feature-function, but also in ease of access and deployment for everyone. Hear how (in partnership with PC versions) COOL can deliver on Digital Sovereignty, as well as about the latest developments in feature, functionality and integration with other projects. From making things much more beautiful with UX improvement & polish for users, to expanded Prometheus metrics for admins. Hear about interactivity improvements, CPU utilization wins, and lots of new features such as our new Grammar checking server integration with LanguageTool & DudenCorrector, as well as new easy font management APIs & tooling to improve interoperability. See how we can deliver scalable, secure, on-premise editing of your documents with a simple, easy to deploy office for the free world.

Collabora Online (COOL) brings LibreOffice technology to the browser and integrates with a large number of different Open Source products. Come and hear how you can plug into new APIs we have for Grammar checking (with LanguageTool), Bibliography Management (with Zotero), and translation integration (with DeepL). Hear how an integration can work, and the new SDK samples to build on that we provide to make things easy for developers. Also catch a glimpse of the many improvements to the product that we've made to improve collaboration performance, interactivity, as well as core LibreOffice technology pieces around intereoperability and performance. Hear about our plans around off-line in the browser, and ask any questions you have.

Online performance wins making collaborative editing in your browser quicker.

Collabora Online has a novel model that allows re-using the core LibreOffice Technology to provide rich collaborative editing. Recently we have been been focusing our development on improving the 'feel' and slickness of document editing as a key part of user experience. We have also been working on improving editing performance with larger numbers of concurrent active editors.

Come and hear about the things that we've found and fixed, both in COOL and also in the LibreOffice core to improve interactivity and to make collaborative editing fly.

Making Collabora Online and it's LibreOffice technology as simple as possible to consume for users with limited time or technical skill is vital. Hear how we bundled COOL as an AppImage, plugged it into PHP, and implemented a websocket proxy-protocol to make that happen.

Collabora Online uses websockets to bring the LibreOffice core's rendering to users' browsers and mobiles. This gives us a smooth low latency editing experience. This however requires a persistent server process, something inimical to the PHP processes we integrate with. Hear how we overcame this limitation, to get an AppImage that can bootstrap, and a protocol that re-uses the HTTP keep-alive to rather successfully emulate a polling websocket based on PHP. Hear about some of the pit-falls we fell into, and the 'obvious' ideas to make things better that didn't pan out.

The Collabora Online code-base can bring the power of LibreOffice into an iframe inside your web app. Come and hear how we've made that power even prettier and more functional for your user's delectation.

Collabora Online is super-easy to integrate with content management applications, come see some pictures of many successful integrations. Understand how the product works, scales and can bring a very easy to deploy bundle of interoperable document beauty to your application. See the internals of Collabora Online, and checkout how you can get involved with building, debugging, and developing it. Hear about our growing community, and all the changes we've done to make life better for our users, integrators and contributors in the last year.

Overcoming the synchronous web copy/paste API's limitations in real browsers is extremely non-trivial. Come & hear how we provide rich copy/paste support across browsers, inside our app and hear a bit about how this mess should be fixed.

Collabora has been working to provide a good user-experience for Collabora Online - bringing LibreOffice to the web, and a particularly challenging aspect of this has been copy/paste. One of our challenges is that by design we keep our document data on the server, which is at the end of an asynchronous web-socket. Another challenge is the impossibly baroque and arguably mis-designed set of clipboard APIs that we have to work with.

Hear a story of how we defeated the issues, as well as the somewhat sad UX compromises we were forced to make for the hard cases.

The Collabora Online code-base can bring the power of LibreOffice into an iframe inside your web app. Come and hear how this works, how to integrate secure, collaborative document editing with your software, and about all the latest greatest work going on there.

Collabora Online uses a WOPI-like protocol, and it is rather simple to integrate. Come hear about the total of three REST methods you need for a simple integration, as well as the wealth of options to control how collaboration works.

Hear about some of our integrations into Nextcloud, Kolab, Mattermost, Moodle, ownCloud, and many more.

See the internals of Collabora Online, and how you can get involved with building, debugging, and developing it, and checkout some of the new features for Mobile and PC browser that we've been working on to make life better for our users.

From ten years of LibreOffice, how can you apply what we learned to your project ? What is going on in LibreOffice today, and where is it going ? and How can you re-use or contribute to the story.

Come hear about the story of LibreOffice, the reasons we started - and some of the highlights: successes, failures and other lessons learned from our first ten years. Hear how our initial decisions and vision of open-ness and vendor neutrality panned out. See what has been learned about building an effective commercial ecosystem, with certification.

Hear about the trajectory of technical updates and how we

re-juvenated an open-source code-base through massive re-factoring, as well as re-targetting for web and mobile.

Catch up with the latest in Online innovation, optimization

and scalability work as well as our growing integration with lots of other Open Source projects.

Finally catch up with the latest and greatest feature/function

improvements as we move towards LibreOffice 7, and find out how you can best get involved with the next decade of the LibreOffice story.

Come hear how you can avoid giving your documents to a large proprietary company - and yet enjoy powerful collaborative editing of text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Come hear how you can avoid giving your documents to a large proprietary company - and yet enjoy powerful collaborative editing of text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Hear how you can host that yourself, integrated into various other FLOSS projects. See how the code is structured - bringing the full power of LibreOffice's rendering and interoperability, along with an increasing amount of our feature surface to the browser.

See some demos of it in action. Hear how you can get involved with development, build a rich integration via scripting and integrate this with your own online solution.

Hear about our relatively simple collaboration protocol, the thinking behind it, and the great privacy, security, and even some performance benefits it brings vs. traditional multiple-model, streamed composable operation approaches.

The Online code-base can bring LibreOffice into an iframe in your web app. Come and hear how this works, how to integrate it with your software, and about all the options and tweaks that go with this.

Online uses a WOPI-like protocol, and it is simple to integrate. Come hear about the total of three REST methods you need for a simple integration. Hear about the wealth of options to control sharing work.

See how Online works, and how you can get involved with building, debugging, and developing it, and checkout some of the new features we've been working on to make life better for our users.

Come and hear how LibreOffice is meeting the challenges of new platforms both hardware and software, adapting to new constraints & shining.

LibreOffice has faced a lot of challenges recently, from hardware providing ever more threading resource to the need to provide an online version in the browser. These bring some interesting solutions.

Come and hear the story of how we're bringing the code-base up-to-date, from providing a ~constant-time threaded XML parser, to parallelising the guts of Calc's calculation engine.

Catch the latest in Online innovation, optimization and scalability work as well as its growing integration with lots of other Open Source projects. Hear how we're starting to bring dialogs both to your browser, and to your native Linux desktop toolkit.

Finally catch up with the latest and greatest feature/function improvements coming in LibreOffice 6.0 - our next major release timed to co-incide with FOSDEM release, and find out how you can best get involved with LibreOffice.

We had a number of interesting problems threading the Calc computation core, come and see how we addressed many of them and checkout the result.

Come and hear the story of how we threaded the Calc core to get some great efficiency wins on the new deeply threaded Ryzen era. Hear about the rather complicated Calc-ulation core, and see how we used tool to profile and optimize from cachegrind, oprofile, perf and many others. Discover some of the challenges of spreadsheets, why it's perhaps not quite as simple as you might hope, see how we tried to make this maintainable and test-able.

Checkout the feeds and speeds, and help advise us on how we

can improve concurrency and scalability for your particular use-case and how you can involved contributing to Calc.

We now have hardware with increasing numbers of threads and functional blocks left & right. Come and hear how we plan to use that for maximum effect to make LibreOffice rock - things we have already done, things we are working on doing, and how you can get involved to encourage your PC to use more of its power to speed your LibreOffice up.

The story of how we make LibreOffice Online scale and perform securely for a large number of concurrent users.

As LibreOffice moves online, it provides a Free Software alternative to Office365 using a rather similar high-fidelity, full-feature architecture. This brings a number of interesting challenges we've had to solve. Performance challenges include - how can we run 1000 concurrent users on a reasonably sized server ? How can we share as much as possible of the bootstrapping and setup functionality to reduce memory usage ? Can we really use Linux's hugepages to reduce TLB cost ? Security is also an interesting concern with the challenge of building a layered model to ensure that no one bad-actor can compromise other user's documents despite having such an extensive attack surface.

Come and hear the story of the development of LibreOffice Online how Collabora solves these problems, and how you can get it in the CODE project. Also catch up with the latest and greatest feature/function improvements coming in LibreOffice 5.1 - our annual FOSDEM release, and find out how you can best get involved with LibreOffice.

Hear about the huge improvements we made in VCL in the last year.

Come hear about the work on the Visual Class Library (VCL) in the last year - the bottom of the cross-platform graphics system that LibreOffice is built on. See how we've re-factored the per-platform backends, improved the lifecycle mechanism (VclPtr), re-vamped our main-loop (the idle handler re-work) as well as many other long overdue improvements. Also hear about how we're using OpenGL to accelerate rendering and improve quality.

Calc has undergone some revolutionary changes in recent years to improve parallelism and enable OpenCL calculation, I'll explain this base-line that we've reached. I'll then explain recent improvements from Collabora in the dependency engine to further accelerate computation, and to shrink memory usage of the spreadsheet. Then we'll look at the next steps, and where you can get involved.

Come and hear how you can re-use LibreOffice's powerful functionality in a variety of settings: for document indexing, headless on a server, file format shifting, charting, and more.

LibreOffice has a ton of interesting and useful functionality, and a supposedly wonderful abstract component model. However in-practise re-using it for different purposes than a PC office suite is a real pain. Come and hear how we're overcoming this in various ways. Hear about our command-line format conversion avoiding remote control RPC issues. See how you can use liblibreoffice to bring a complete libreoffice into your process without a dependency and linking nightmare. Hear about our new tiled rendering and how it can be applied to new user interfaces.

Traditionally, LibreOffice has had an appallingly slow and mis-architected spreadsheet core. Come and hear how we've re-designed it to take advantage of the major wins possible with both GPU and CPU parallelism, and extrapolate that to your application.

Traditionally, LibreOffice has had an appallingly slow and mis-architected spreadsheet core. Come and hear how we've re-designed it to take advantage of the major wins possible with both GPU and CPU parallelism, and extrapolate that to your application. See how Calc can now give you a real appreciation of what a teraflop of GPU computing power can really do inside your workstation, and understand how terrible things used to be.

Hear about the structural challenges that OpenCL and the GPU

brings, and how getting the underlying data structures and design right is the key to better performance. Grasp how the next generation of integrated CPU/GPU hardware with a Heterogenous System Architecture starts to enable efficient crunching of huge data-sets.

We'll also look at how we're starting to use threading to

speed up load/save not just in calc, but also in other parts of the suite. I'll also showcase some of the latest improvements in our FOSDEM release: LibreOffice 4.2.

A series of stories about how we’ve tackled the huge challenges of updating an old code-base and giving it a bright future and the impact of large-scale code-change in that process on quality and features in 4.0.

Come and hear how we’ve built an international team of developers to tackle the problems of resurrecting a poorly-understood, gigantic code-base extensively commented in German, with no unit tests, a tangled build infrastructure, and twenty-five years of un-paid technical debt.

Hear some stories of where we’ve come from - some comedy architectural disasters, and where we want to move to. Find out how you can get involved in that process. See the bug metrics, how we track our progress, regression counts, and the tooling we use to encourage participation and adapt the code. Does paying technical debt by significant, risky re-factoring pay? come and see the bug metrics.

See how we’ve innovated on top of this base with new features, new platforms and hear about some of the goodness in LibreOffice 4.0.

Come and hear about how to get involved in coding on the project with no prior experience. Starting with some easy first hacks, and then how to build up to bigger and more interesting things.

Hear how LibreOffice is tackling our users demands both for an 'app', a web office suite, and a traditional fat client, and how we have fun while improving the software.

As the world moves simultaneously either to the cloud or towards 'apps' - come hear how LibreOffice is tackling our users' needs in both of these (apparently conflicting) directions with the same code-base. See a demo of the LibreOffice On-Line prototypem, grasp the technologies, understand the benefits and problems of this model of web provision, and hear how you can play with / adapt gtk+ / broadway to your application. Hear about our handset / tablet developments, and our ongoing work to get smaller and faster. See how almost all the work we do for these products helps the normal fat-client office experience too. Finally, of course some degree of catch up with the progress of LibreOffice as a code-base and community as we ship our version 3.5 will be presented, along with pointers for how to get involved in development.

A quick analysis of the risks and benefits that copyright assignment can bring to the Free Software ecosystem. I'll take a qualitative look at the side-effects of assignment on the diversity of project participants, and the knock-on impact that decisions in this area can have on the economics of supporting Free Software development. Come and find out how you can avoid making a mess of your community for some rather dubiuous legal advantages.

Looking at some easy hacks - some worked examples in getting started in the LibreOffice project. We have a ton of entry level tasks, all of them useful that we'd love to get people involved with. We also have some more juicy, but still really useful things we need to get done too.