So, the next presentation will be with Michael Meeks, and it's titled Colabora Online, Richard
Collaboration.
Thank you so much.
Well, lovely to see you all.
Oh, well, you know, I didn't do anything yet.
I should leave on a high.
I think I should quit now, but anyway, thank you for coming.
You're rock.
So, in case you've been living under a rock, I will just present some pictures initially
off of the beauty that is, can't elaborate on mine.
Look at this view, blue, familiar.
Okay, so there is a Google, sorry, a more traditional toolbar UI that you can use, but there's
also a more tabbed tool panel as well that makes it look nice, and of course, all of
your nice spreadsheets and web processing documents in whatever newfangled or horrible
legacy, file format you like.
Lots of good interoperability presentations, even as well, and drawings.
So, we can do it a little bit of diagramming.
We could always improve the user experience there, that will be good.
But, of course, on your mobile phone too, so we can shrink the thing down.
We can turn, actually, the mobile thing you want is, effectively, this slide bar.
So, this is a slide bar panel in the desktop PC version, and we can wrap that, and turn
that into this very nice, one-handed format hang and properties UI.
And you can either run that as a web view component, so you can suck that in, I can
the next cloud app does this, so you can then collaborate inside that application, a very
seamless leap.
And build that into your app, or you can have a fact-lined app that brings, essentially,
the server, the LibreOfficeK base, running offline on your device, so that's pretty nice.
So, how do you deploy it, I mean, obviously, you want it, you've seen it.
So, how can we get it out there?
Well, there are a few tips and tricks, and I believe that the system administrators like
to sneak into this conference, and that gets all sorts of clever things.
So, the easiest way, probably, is to grab the HelmChart, or an all-in-one image.
I mean, there are also people making images that bundle our technology with it.
But, assuming you just want to deploy this at reasonable scale, the HelmChart is a pretty
good way.
Kubernetes makes this very, very simple for you.
And, yeah, there's a whole lot of nice features here.
But one of the things that seems like it might be an issue, but also is a massive benefit,
is that our model is extremely simple.
So, everybody editing the same document comes into the same machine, the same pods, the
same process, the same address space.
And so, the real trick then is that when you load a document, you have a thing called
a WOPPY source, and you have to get through this routing matrix based on your WOPPY
source into that place, and then you can collaborate.
And that's very nice.
So, we don't need very clever ways of synchronizing things.
They're all already synchronized, which is beautiful.
And it does mean that there's no real communication between any of those nodes.
Like, don't load the same document on five different nodes, and then have a message bus that
tries to, you know, that seems just very complicated.
And when you look at the statistics of how many people are editing concurrently, it just
doesn't make any sense either.
So, this is a really, really good model.
And it scales with the network.
It works very nicely with all sorts of load balances.
And it's pretty cool.
And do you remember that I mentioned that each document then has this WOPPY source
identifier that identifies uniquely that document?
That WOPPY source actually has the URL for where to get the document from.
And so, this protocol is really just a web download.
It downloads it off the web, the document, loads it, allows you to collaborate.
And then it posts it back again when it's done or when it all two saves in the background,
which it now does.
So, what does that mean?
Well, that does mean that it's incredibly multi-tenant, right?
So, with a single cool cluster, you can run here as a small selection of some of our
open source partners, who, well, some of the conference here.
I have two next clouds, primarily because, well, it's, you can have multiple systems,
even at the same type, talking to the same cluster.
So, you can get all sorts of economies of scale and wonder, which is really nice and,
you can get the configuration from this from a remote web URL.
So, you can have lots of pods, lots of different bits of server here.
And they just download their configuration, they pull it every minute, and they read
just to adapt for new instances of any of these things coming in.
So, very nice, if you're deploying a real scale, if you're a host, if you want to, you
know, to make this work nicely.
So, since that's pretty all good stuff, but I'd like to just look at some of the, the
most recent features we've added, and one of those is automatic documents.
So, if you're, if you're in a government or a big organization, you'll discover
that forms are, you know, the king, and filling out data, and interacting with that nicely,
is really, really important, that my arrows are looking a bit faint.
But, but essentially, what you want to do is you want to create multiple documents from
templates, you want to get data out of forms, you want to see, see what's going on with
documents.
And so, there are many paths to that.
What we've provided is a rest endpoint, which is very, very simple to use as a tool
component earlier.
The stopsters.
And that then allows you to have a document, a DocX, a Doc, a OTT, what, what have you
like, and to suck all sorts of information out of that as Jason, so you can get all of
these properties, and then you can shove the information in as Jason.
So, you have a document, and Jason, you post it, and you get something back in whatever
format you like, you know, PDFs or whatever.
So, very nice.
So, if a document property is often used for content management systems and, you know, all
sorts of things to tag and organize documents and work out what they are, but probably
more useful are forms.
So, creating forms is something any users should be able to do, and that's all built
in.
There's a nice form tab, which you can click, and get all of these things, and you can
pop them into your documents, and even pre-populate them.
And so, a user can do that very, very simply.
We have a beautiful integration then with next cloud, that then allows you to pick, you
can pick a template there, thumbnail it, and then you can actually just suck all of that
stuff out of it.
So, you know, you can actually start to fill in those template fields in a different UI here,
and underneath it's still using that Jason, Jason API, not any to create documents, but
then to be able to find you and them, edit them, tweak them to your use, which is really
cool.
Of course, it's no good just having text.
We like to have pretty pictures, you know, how, how, how is your data going in this
whole, you know, structure for doing this, you can create slides, you can put content in
them, and we'll see where we'll let go.
So, very, very rich and powerful API, if you need more things, come and tell me, but the
punchline is simple.
You have a document, you have some Jason, you can merge them together, or you can suck
Jason out, and it's very simple, easy to use, and easy to develop things with, which is
kind of cool.
Another thing you discover in, in larger organizations is that some, that you need to be
very polite when you talk to people, so it's no good if you're a vet saying, you know,
dead hamster or something, and just posting that to the guy who's hamster has passed on.
Instead, it's better if you press F3, and a beautiful sensitive block of text arrives, you
know, expressing, you know, the regrets and so on about the, there's this tragedy, and, and
that's great.
And so, you know, the entropy may decrease massively, but the feel improves, you know,
everyone is happy when they get, well, happier when they get this letter.
And so all the text is a really good way of then deploying these large databases of nice
sounding, friendly text that people can type in and complete, and then, then, build on.
And, yeah, so it's just just one way that that sort of stuff goes, goes around the place.
And we've also built a sort of, a nice eye frame, so there's a whole lot of configuration
settings and beautiful things you can do in the underlying engine we have.
And so far, we've really limited how they can be shown, but we now have an eye frame that
you can now embed in an integration like next cloud.
And yeah, you can then configure all of these sort of things, so dictionaries and auto
text and all sorts of other settings to make it very, very easy way of embedding that in
your integration and configure them.
So, you know, when you, when you get your spelling, your spell checker is confused and
can't keep up with the world, you know, you can right click on it, and you can add stuff
to your dictionary and the end of your life is, life is good again.
Actually, if you get back in time, interestingly, quite a lot of our performance problems,
we're rendering this beautiful, busier spline underneath here, turned out this was the
majority of rendering cost back in, you know, five, five years ago, you could render
as many charts or whatever you like, but this is very carefully drawn, yeah, lots of
floating point math.
Anyway, it's fast now, but it would be nice to have fewer of them, which is good.
So, again, this is a new API then that allows us to save many more, many more pieces
back to the, to the, the filesync and share solution, or whoever is implementing that
wapy back end, and then, then bring them back.
It also means that we can start to move settings out of the browser, so there are some
sets of settings, like, are you, are you, are you using dark mode or are you, you know,
do you like to see non-printing characters and there's going to be something that we've
traditionally stored in the browser?
And that's fine, I mean, like it works very nicely, but there are a class of people
who are sufficiently security paranoid that they don't want anything stored in the browser,
not even, I like to see non-printing characters as, as dots and new lives, right?
So, so they get very, very upset, and they inject all sorts of headers, and it would be
nice to have all of our configurations stay on the server, so I think over time we'll
be moving all of that back into our stateless containers and then essentially serializing
them back into, you know, the faster they can share back end.
In order to do that, as you can imagine, when these multi-tenant systems with different sets
of dictionaries and whatever, there's all sorts of cleverness going in.
So, so one of the things we do to make this efficient is that we effectively pre-forke
a collaborative online, so we initialize the back end, which is reasonably large, thank
you.
And then we essentially, we fork that, and that takes about six milliseconds, so I mean,
if you ever, you know, load time or something, you know, we can clone all that state
copy on right, and that's fine.
And we now have this multi-level version, so for each tenant, they may have different
dictionaries, different state, different, everything, and so now we have a clever system
to manage these multiple things, and so it's a double fork system, so it's kind of kind
of fun.
So, we don't hold the things and commenting, so which is really nice, so one of the things
is in this, has funded?
Ah, excellent.
Is the apps at mentioning people in comments, very often, you want to comment on the documents
and also notify someone that they should jolly well fix this piece, or whatever, and so
they get a friendly mail saying jolly well fix this piece.
And there's a comment, you know, you can come to it and see what's going on, and that's
working now, really nicely in next cloud, and the API is there for anyone else.
We've also improved the look of comments, so sometimes people write the whole document
in the comment, instead of in the document, I don't know why, but anyway, that's all
good for them.
And so now you can sort of enlarge this and show comment bigger, I mean, I don't
know, I think in large comment, we'll be about it anyway, we're trying to be working
to improve the English, nested replies, so one of the cool things is that the open source
institutes, you know, who are awesome, and, you know, defined as the open source as it
were, really have big documents, they want lots of discussion and commenting on.
So we added a feature for them, which is this comment only permission for write documents,
we had it for PDF already, because people don't edit PDFs, I guess, much, or they shouldn't.
And yeah, and so we added this for docs, so people can come in and then comment, say on
a legal license document or something, and then we can then do comment threading and, you
know, conversations and this sort of thing, and you can even delete only your own comment,
which is helpful.
So thank you to the OSI for that.
Another thing they've arranged it in was WordPress, making a plug-in so you can just upload
a file into WordPress, and, you know, install every easily and have, you know, your edit
button here and then load that up and then collaboratively edit on your website, extreme
easy to deploy, extreme easy then get commenting feedback, discussion around proposals.
And yeah, kind of, kind of cool, so that's come in the last, last weeks, another thing
we'd be doing with Digit, the European Commission's Digital Governance, whatever thing,
which is an awesome and open social, it's a great company, is adding the same thing
to Drupal effectively.
So, you know, you have this viewing, collaborative online, edit, and collaborative online,
and so you can really get stuck into your sharing documents.
It's quite interesting that people use content management systems are a funny, funny
use cases, you know, whatever you have, you really want to be collaborating in documents.
So, people use all these quite amazing things, you know, you use a bug tracker and you
upload an attachment and really what you want to do is collaboratively editing, or you, you
know, use confidence, and actually it's not used as a wicked tool, it's used as a placed
upload files that you can then collaboratively edit on, or it turns out that there's even
better news, which is, X-Mikki has a beautiful integration here, and so, you know, obviously,
you know, probably Wikki's a better way to collaborate on some situations, and, but if you
have those rich documents now, you can stick those in as attachments and just get this
beautiful, beautiful integration with X-Wikki to edit those files and kind of break on them.
So, collaboration is the key, there's nothing, you just put it over tool, you can to get
it done.
Another thing that Zendis actually funded is user experience improvements, but particularly
finding out what's wrong, so, hopefully you'll tell me at the end what's wrong anyway.
I'm very interested in products input, so grab me at the end, we always try to improve,
but we've built a whole lot of UI logging and some charting tools, the thing we're missing
is that it's a lemantry, so if someone wants to come and do a, you know, so we're fully
enterprise compatible and large American corporation compatible, really we should be
sending all of your private information abroad as it's typed in.
We don't have that bit at the moment, you know, and anyway, so there's no telemetry actually
in there at all, but it will stream a set of anonymized commands in order and rough
time stamps to some files that the system can use to crunch with some tooling we have,
so, you know, it doesn't say what you've entered, it just says you entered some text at
this point and you paste it and all of these other things, so you can then see, for example,
how quickly people actually type versus how quickly they think they type, so, so that's
quite fun, and this guy out here, you might think, is some kind of monster typing group,
but almost certainly they're just mashing the keyboard in the text, test session.
You can be about 10 times faster if you mash the keyboard than if you actually need it
to make sense.
So, other interesting things is you can see how commands correlate and which bits are
used together and so on, you can build pretty heat chops of that, perhaps more interesting
is what is undone, so if you're pairing undue with commands, you know, where is the highest
regret, you know, people type something angry and then they undo it or something or
they wrap their text or they delete pages and their presentations, I think, you know, and
they try and get them back again, and they come back, which is good, so interesting to
see this data and good to pull that out, another thing we've done is add a whole lot of
deeper style features and integrations there, so there's a lot of power in styling documents,
that's really cool, and we haven't had that in collaboration line and we've just added
that, so there's now a style list button, the pops up not just paragraph styles, but all
the character list and page and all the other different kinds of style, that you can
have in managing complex documents, this is very good if you're subtenically neurotic,
so you can find all of those things that shouldn't be in your documents and delete them,
they're unused, you know, whatever, but you can also then see what's actually going on
in your documents, is this spotlight button and you click it, and then suddenly it draws
all of these beautiful things over the top of your paragraphs, so you can see in what
style is being used and then you can correlate that with the numbers and the colors
and work out, what's going on, and make your document as beautiful as it should always
have been, which is great, or perhaps you can work out, you can put a comment in there
going, Jim, you break the document again, please learn how to use styles, you know, or
whatever, and send them a notification, so they learn and grow in a good way, I'm presentations
we've done lots of work on presentations, so this is presenting window feature, which is great,
presented console pieces, so you can see what's coming, which is always relatively helpful,
and we talked about presenting, a lot of screens presenting windows extremely useful for
your video calls, so you're sharing this little window, but not, you can still read
something else while you're in a meeting, so yes, 3D transitions, a whole lot of good things
here with WebGL, so you can see, you know, them all doing wonderful things, I like the WebGL
because we're really providing functionality that no one else provides on web platform,
a lot of the web office suites you'll see out there really kind of rather embarrassingly
up-down and featureless, and we're trying to buck that trend and provide the full, the
full solution for everyone, in as much as we can, the browser, you know, doesn't do everything,
but it provides a lot of, a lot of goodness, and they even added a sound API in a few
years ago, which is great, so you can make sound. Anyway, right, so you snap lines for
arranging things in presentations, very helpful to get everything just right, if you want
to convert your X wiki into a PowerPoint presentation, you know, you can add all these links,
so that you can do sort of choose your own presentation and click on things and jump to slides,
and, you know, it's like one of those novels you could buy as a child, where it's a different
story each time you're all a dice or something, and, anyway, but there's all of these embedded
actions that you can apply to your shapes and so on, and we've made it faster and better
at the starting, so that's good. We try to make it easier for people to work out what they've
done wrong, which is always good, so if you've misconfigured it horribly, maybe you can find
out how, which is good, and we'd links to the SDK or install instructions to say,
yeah, perhaps you need a certificate or something. We do a lot of work to try and isolate
documents and containers, so each document is inside its own container, SCH routes, filtered
system calls, can't do anything, there's no shell in there, there's just fonts and
little information so on, so extremely secure. Unfortunately, we need privileges to do that,
you need capsis admin to see a route, which seems like an odd odd requirement, but anyway,
that was annoying, so within instead we switch to using Linux name spaces where we can't,
so actually we can do both. Linux name spaces incredibly powerful, you can effectively become
route inside your own name space with a different view of the file system, and lock something
down really beautifully, the problem with that is that you become route inside it, anyway, so
there's security concerns with user space name spaces as well, so as soon as we get a tool
we can use to make things secure, some since admin disables it as a security hazard,
which is a shame. But anyway, so the app armor and SELINICs both trying to turn this off,
many things better for open shift, but we can install profiles that say, hey, we really do need to
be able to actually make things secure, so please give us the privileges we need.
Instructability is absolutely vital, obviously, we've done a whole lot of work with PDF 2.0,
again, I think, funded by Zendes, so thank you, and lots of good things coming there and a
better, pretty of standard, lots of interrupt improvements, I think, a better font,
font metrics, we don't have the same font, maybe you can't see the difference between the two
foxes, but there is a difference except they're laid out nicely, the metrics are exactly
the same, and then lots of other interruptability improvements, you know, improve random
count functions and more compliance here and there, and more systematic approach to testing
and avoiding regressions there, and well, here we are, so our partners, customers and community
make it possible, we can't do anything without them. There are some projects where, you know,
there's a money ferry, and yeah, well, there's no money ferry in our world, so we have to actually
work hard and do good things, and that's great, it keeps us close to the users and the customers,
so just thank you again to everyone who's partnered with us, works with us, and does good things,
and I'm trying to get this, this meme into people's minds, so if you just keep saying it to yourself,
like a mantra, it'll help you sleep, and sleep at night, because you should pay for what you
use to keep it free, so there you go, keep doing that pay for what you thank you,
who's paid well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. So love is a very powerful force,
but economics is also a very powerful force, and if no one pays, you know, then, then,
well, for what they use, then it's hard to keep it free, so at least do, and there's a final bullet
point, since I just told you it was not about politics, the conference, I thought I would just
share you a friend of mine, Terrace Zoon, and actually this is his hand, and that's a machine
gun bullet, he helped to remove from a civilian and Ukraine, and so I just encourage you to
support Ukraine, and stick with that, and so these are the conclusions, join in, try our
later stuff, it's brilliant, you can download it, there's a code, if you pay for what you use,
you can keep it free, there are great code versions of this out there, that you can download
and use and try, and they're integrated in many of our partners, systems out of the box,
and hey, loads of new features, get involved, get stuck in, the source code is all open source,
obviously, and yeah, the loads of cool stuff there, we'd love to work with you, so thank you,
say very much, thank you, thank you, thank you, Michael, we have about three minutes in
how for questions, there is one question, if you have quick questions,
we have Klim on running now to make it all test test, first of all it's just a thank you for
a frankly astonishing talk, it was very, very impressive, I've a single question about the
automatic document stuff, which is really, it sounds really cool, imagine, so I'm just
what I get clear about like what the inputs are, so imagine, I've got a company, I've got a
bunch of people making documents already there like somewhat structured, maybe it's like a table
with like structured field names in the left hand side and all the junk in the right hand side,
is that the source thing you can deal with? Yeah, exactly that, yes, so if we can't, we'd love to
know because we can fix it, but yes, the idea is that you take your existing documents,
what we really want is not to reinvent the world, you want to take those existing dock eggs
of what are the horror templates and then get them into an open source free world, you know,
suck data out of them, put data into them, and tweak them often people do a mail merge,
but they need to just check the last 1% or whatever, yeah and then, you know, we can convert it
to any format you like, you know, your PDFs, your dock eggs, your XLSX, you know, it's all there,
well hopefully you're open standards, your ADT isn't ODS is installed, so yeah, well this might be the
thing that moves my company away from, awesome, from the office suite, so love, love together,
that's brilliant, yeah, yeah, you, you won't regret it, so yeah, come and see me again and we'll
talk. Great question. Thank you. Oh, is it genuine? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just some thing, uh, if I follow me, it was lacking because I don't, I, it was the link was,
it, uh, directs is to, to possibility to have a limited to comments, pay their files, uh,
it was a problem. Yes, commenting on PDFs, so, uh, I, I, I rack my brains, there is some,
some degree of commenting and stamping and putting things on top of PDFs, you can do at the
moment, I believe, I think that's there. Um, so yes, that should be possible in collaboration
with mine, that's my current take, but if, if it's not working in the latest version, we, you know,
come and come and see me, um, yeah, we'll talk to the guy who, uh, who makes it work, it should be
fine, I think. Thank you. Another question, maybe less fun. Oh, oh, what your question
looks like the talk well is pretty clear. Thanks so much for being me. Thank you, Michael.
Let's see guys. Enjoy yourselves.