Collabora Office 5.0 has been released, and it incorporates most of the features and changes that landed in LibreOffice 5.0 and 5.1.
Collabora is not all that known by regular Linux users since they mostly do work that involves enterprise settings. It’s important to know that even if they use LibreOffice for Collabora Office, they are also contributing upstream. In fact, Collabora is one of the biggest contributors, if not the biggest, for LibreOffice.
You might wonder why a company or public administration would choose to get Collabora Office instead of the regular LibreOffice, which is free. The answer is simple, and that is support. You can’t just install LibreOffice and move on. Things get broken, installations need to be upgraded, and maybe new features have to be added.
The guys over at Collabora Office won’t move an entire company from one version to another of the application. Instead, they will most likely backport to the existing branch, and that will cut down on the time spent on major upgrades.
Collabora Office 5.0 has arrived
“Today we released Collabora Office 5.0. This version includes a long list of updates, including much-improved Microsoft import and export filters. And, it also contains all fixes from the upstream libreoffice-5-0 branch and several backported features from 5.1,” reads the official announcement.
The developers have explained that the users interface has been upgraded whereas style previews in the Sidebar, image cropping, table management, conditional formatting in Calc have been improved. Moreover, the remote file open/save dialogue has been refined, extended support for Windows Server ADMX Group Policy templates has been implemented, and numerous security fixes have been implemented.
This is not the first version of Collabora Office, and the developers also had a 4.4 branch, which was updated along with the 5.0. You can’t download Collabora Office to see how it looks, but if you’re in an enterprise environment, you could ask for a demo.
Via Softpedia