Let's start again. So my name is Julius, I work for next slot and I want to talk a bit about
the next. Office mainly with a focus on how we work together with Colabra and the Libra Office
community to build the web office integration into next cloud. For those that aren't aware,
just I keep that brief because I guess most people know what next slot is. We are a content
collaboration platform, fully free and open source. Every code is available to everyone. We
have different components. We have class-to-five management group where mail calendar, next
or talk as a video and chat platform and of course next office as one key component there.
Where we work together with Colabra to build that and this is how our next office looks
like. If you've seen Colabra online before, it looks quite familiar. We have a couple of adjustments
there to fit a bit more into the next cloud user interface and UI that we have. Different
I can set slightly more simplified user interface but generally the software is the same and of
course we make advantage of all the advanced features that Colabra online has. As mentioned,
we work closely together with Colabra. I get a bit more into that later on like how our teams
work together because I think that's also one important part that probably still happens
not often enough that open source projects work together or closely together. Of course,
everything is based on the office as kind of the core for all the nice document editing there.
I want to highlight a few features or integration works that we did together in the past
roughly past year. One of that is a feature that Colabra recently added is an API for
document extraction of information and transfer transformation of documents. This is API work that
most of the data from Colabra online did online and the process core. It allows, it gives us
a rest API where you can send a document to and then you will get like a structured JSON data
with the content of the document. Can be images embedded, can be like paragraphs or slides,
you get like all the different elements that are there and then the second part of this API is
that there is a transformation endpoint so you are able to pass document and then do certain changes
on it and that all from an external party like from next time for example. As of right now,
there is like a way to for filling out forms with content controls. There is support for all
kind of different controls that are there in documents. There is the ability to read and write
chart data. You can set document properties if you want to add copyright information or certain things
and the most recent addition is that you can actually do changes to presentation slides.
I get a bit more into that later. First of all, this is a bit of how we make use of this
API instead of next slots for the content controls. We added the ability that if you have a template
you start creating a new document with basically render all the content controls that are in the
document as like a nice form that users can fill out. You basically just like enter the information
then you will end up with a nice detailed document there. The second part is that within next
slide we integrate with another open source tool, a windmill for building more complex
automations and this is where the API imports really become powerful because you can build like
all kind of workflows for like company processes, processes in public administrations where one
aspect then for example could be to generate a PDF out of a form with data that comes from other
systems. This is where it really becomes more powerful. Put on transforming slides that was
the most recent addition so it's a command queue that you can basically pass any commands that should
be executed on that specific file. So there are slides, commands select certain slides to change
layout to set text on it. Just so you have an idea that's from the documentation of collaborative.
So you can basically rearrange the slides at new slides in there and then set the text and we
want to basically experiment with this to be able to generate slides in experiment with LLMs also
because there's like I mean AI is a huge topic. There's probably no way around that anymore. So
we also want to get involved in that part and this is kind of the groundwork done by
by collaborative. Yeah that's kind of like there are APIs as mentioned. They can be used
either on collaborative side or we as next are also exposed them and of course we're regular
discussing all the future use cases because they could be a lot more things that you can
transform documents to like spreadsheets we haven't looked into yet what exactly you could do with
those so there's likely more to come there. One other aspect as I mentioned AI is a topic we are
in next log integrating with all kind of different AI platforms we're most focusing on the ones
that are somewhat open so we also have a rating system for AI there but this is all kind
of optionally in next log you will always have the ability to enable that if you wanted and if not
then there's no involvement of any AI and this is also where we integrated our dynamic AI system
the next log assistant into collaborative you can just click a button and then get access to whatever
LLMs you have integrated there. Next one is one example that has been around for quite a while in
collaborative online like a five conversion API quite simple we made use of that already for
yeah for years just for generating previous files but we actually now also integrated that into
the user interface make it easier for users to convert files right from the file listing without even
opening the full office UI and yeah there's more work ongoing like we want to make the setup
easier because that's I think most like majority of issues that we get reported and see in the internet
is about problems with the setup and people get errors that they don't understand so we want to
really want to make that easier we're trying to catch more and more scenarios where connectivity
could fail and with recent work from Miven from collaborative we actually close to last gaps or
we can do now also can check the connectivity from collaborative to next cloud and basically
can cover the full chain of where network connectivity could go wrong and yeah I mean that's just
like how we try to expose the user interface so we try to give more hints on where things go wrong
and then point people to the right documentation or ideally you just give them a hint on what they
need to change immediately yeah I mean there's a lot more happening you heard a couple of things from
Michael all the great features that are ongoing in collaboratively office performance improvements on
both sides on collaborative but also with the next cloud where we make opening files faster
reduce overhead in the browser and on the server there yeah I think a couple of that was already mentioned
we're planning to look into more deeper integration of slide templates that's maybe also one
interesting thing so you can have all the templates that you have the next cloud right with in
your sidebar of your impress in the browser yeah and generally a lot of bug fixing but I wanted to
also talk a bit about like how we collaborate as to communities to software companies that are there
we are yeah like closely working together our engineers having regular or basically weekly meetings
together where we just exchange on what kind of bugs have been reported on either sides what is kind
of common problems that we run into we do like feature code development where one party comes up
with an idea and then we drive that together forward we also do shared code contributions so
collaborative people are committing changes on our code base on the next local base and the other way
around so we're really trying to help each other there with like the ability that everyone can
provide and there's a lot of good exchange of ideas there like especially this weekly call is really
beneficial I think it's nice to stay in contact to also get insights from how other open source communities
work I think this is really something that isn't happening enough and yeah like if there is any
open source project where you think you can work together definitely try to get in more contact
we've talked to the people and I think being around here for them is kind of the best place to start
it yeah a couple of other things our designers also or usability people are also in
regular exchange we do usability testing both with customers but also with end users
or home users and we also have regular design reviews because in the next time we have quite an
open design team let's say so also people from the community can come to our design team and
ask for reviews of their apps or their the work they're doing get feedback on that so this is
something where we also spread further than the the next our community and also like interact with
collaborative there sometimes we also align with users where it makes sense because if you do
like both work on a feature then you also want to you're probably going to make more
more impact if you announce that together and maybe one thing to mention that something
that collaborative has that I find quite nice is they have a weekly community meeting
call where people can just join get involved just just listen to what's going on
think that yeah something we don't have a next up but I find that quite quite good and quite
interesting to join from time to time yeah and last but least just wanted to
mention that we're of course open for any contributions we work together we have external
contributors as well both next lot and collaborative online have dedicated pages for how you can
do your first contribution we have good first issues like that give you an easy start easy task
into doing a code contribution but also others like translations are reporting issues that's
all valuable things and yeah I think if we work together more between open source projects we can
actually make a bigger impact because yeah just like the synergies we work together and yeah
I mean in general if there are any ideas you want to talk about feel free to
address them share them with us and yeah looking forward to maybe have some additional
contributions there and that was it from my site thank you