Pulling Together

Teamwork in enterprises and community projects no longer means sitting around in meeting rooms or listening in on lengthy telephone conferences. Modern cloud solutions allow decentralized work – whether in the office, home office, or the café on the beach. Most in demand are standard office applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools. Ideally, the programs should look the same in the web browser as on the desktop and offer simultaneous document editing and version control in addition to the basic functions.

Microsoft Office Online [1] and Google Drive [2] have established their position in the market in recent years. The big players are now in for some competition from Collabora [3]. The Cambridge, UK, company integrates LibreOffice Online into its ownCloud Server [4], putting the free office suite on a solid file-hosting basis. In December 2015 [5], the partners announced their cooperation and shortly thereafter released a first version of the developer platform and device-independent software. The Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) is aimed at developers and advanced users who are interesting in testing.

To Work

The developer version is available for free as a virtual machine [6], but without support by the manufacturer. Users need VirtualBox [7] to run CODE. As the template for the new VM, you choose openSUSE (64-bit) and then mount the VMDK file as a virtual hard drive. In the network settings, select the Bridged Adapter. After that, the system is ready to go. After booting, the system reveals the URL under which ownCloud, and thus the Collabora cloud suite, is accessible.

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