Just a short personal note to say how super excited I am to get our very first release of a new Collabora Office out that brings Collabora Online's lovely UX - created by the whole team to the desktop. You can read all about it in the press release. Please note - this is a first release - we expect all manner of unforseen problems, but still - it edits documents nicely.

The heros behind the scenes

There has been a huge amount of work behind the scenes, and people to say thank-you to. Let me try to get some of them:

• First off - thanks to Jan 'Kendy' Holesovsky and Tor Lillqvist (who came out of retirement to create yet another foundational heavy-lift for FLOSS Office. I can't say how grateful we are for your hard work here on Mac and Windows respectively.
• Then after the allotropia merger we had Thorsten Behrens to lead the project, and Sarper Akdemir to drive the Linux front-end.
• Towards the end of the project we were thrilled to expand things to include a dream-team of FLOSS engineers to fix bugs and add features ...
• Thanks to Rashesh Padia for the lovely first-start WebGL slideshow presentation added to Richard Brock's content skills.
• Thanks to Vivek Javiya for building a new file creation UI with Pedro Silva's design skills here and elsewhere.
• Lots of bug fix and polishing work from Parth Raiyani, and Jeremy Whiting (who also did multi-tabbed interface on Mac), and to Stephan Bergmann for digging out and clobbering the most hard-core races and horror bugs that we had hidden, Caolán McNamara too who made multiple documents work, and fixed crashes and multi-screen bits.
• With Hubert Figuière making the flatpak beautiful, and of course the indomitable Andras Timar doing so much amazing work getting all of the CI, release-engineering, app-store, translation pieces and also bug-fixing done and completed in time.
• Thanks too to our marketing team: from Chris Thornett getting the press briefing into a good state and multiplexing quotes left and right, to Richard Brock creating beautiful blog output, to Asja Čandić socializing it all, with Naomi Obbard leading the charge.
• Thanks to all of our supporters who say nice things about us, and of course to so many translators who contribute to making Collabora Online great - hopefully now the strings are all public it should be easy to expand coverage.

This is an outstanding result from so many - thank you!

What is next technically ?

There are lots of things we plan to do next, but there is so much that can be done. First - merging the work into our main product branches - and at the same time sharing much more of the code across platforms. We have some features in the pipeline already - starting to take more advantage of platform APIs for much improved slideshow / multi-screen presentation pieces that need merging and releasing, and ultimately better printing APIs, and better copy/paste. Then we need to make sure that all of the new features are present on all platforms - multi-tabbed UI, the new file creation UI, and of course much more polish and bug fixing - as well as better automated testing.

Its exciting to have a big new release - but in general - we work really quite hard to avoid having big-bang deadlines, and a more steady development cadence. We will be trying to get the feature conveyer belt working alongside the Collabora Online development process - reasonably quickly - but now with another three platforms.

Then over the next months - there are various fairly obvious directions to take the code in - one amusing feature was the ability to apparently collaborate with yourself when loading the same document on the same machine, that can be extended.

Conclusion

It has been really exciting to get feedback from many partners, customers and community members about the need for this. Again - this is a very first release - we plan to do lots of iteration and improvement around it. But, thank you again to the whole team and community for making Collabora Online something that people really want us to bring to the desktop. If you'd like to get involved (or just see pretty artwork of hard working animals) - why not head to community website, or our forum or code.

Rock on =)