Adfinis and Collabora – 10 Years of Driving Innovation and Shaping the Digital Sovereignty Landscape
For 10 years, Adfinis and Collabora Productivity have maintained an intensive partnership to jointly advance the digitally sovereign workplace and promote innovation without jeopardising the privacy of users.
Great partnerships are built over time, and Adfinis and Collabora have cultivated theirs through a series of successful projects, leading to remarkable achievements. As the landscape of collaborative office solutions rapidly evolves, especially in areas where privacy and security are critical, there is a growing demand for alternatives to the dominant players – yet such alternatives remain scarce. It is promising to see a growing ecosystem around the openDesk project that offers viable alternatives to proprietary, data-hungry platforms. Collabora Online plays a crucial role in this effort, particularly in its support for open file formats and standards, which enables interoperable solutions, reduces vendor lock-in and increases freedom of choice.
As we continue on this journey, we would like to take a moment to reflect on the past 10 years and share the story that has led to this successful partnership and also take a look into the future.
It is with thankfulness that I look back on a decade of fruitful cooperation with Nicolas and the team at Adfinis. They are doing great things in the Open Source space, and have been a supportive partner contributing to Collabora Online. We look forward to further cooperation.
– Michael Meeks, CEO Collabora Productivity
From OpenOffice, Solaris, the LibreOffice conference in Bern, to a strong partnership
Nicolas Christener, today CEO of Adfinis, used to manage the OpenOffice packages for the Linux distribution he trusted, among other things. In 2011, a Swiss federal organization became aware of the locally available OpenOffice expertise and commissioned Adfinis to build the OpenOffice solution for the Solaris/Sparc platform after the Sun/Oracle merger, as well as provide the necessary ongoing support.
Around the same time the LibreOffice project split off from OpenOffice, and a new community emerged around this great project. Inspired by Michael Meeks’ call to translate code comments from German (StarOffice was developed in Hamburg) into English, several Adfinis developers began to search for and translate German comments in the source code. This is how Adfinis first gained a foothold in the young LibreOffice community and became available to host the LibreOffice conference in 2014.
Together with Matthias Stürmer, Gabriela Gnägi, Andreas Bürki and many other volunteers, Nicolas Christener organised the 2014 LibreOffice conference in Bern. The conference was a great success and the city of Bern became the global centre of the LibreOffice community for a few days. The presentation by CloudOn, which showed LibreOffice as a native app on iOS, was groundbreaking in convincing people years later that porting to iOS was definitely possible, but many other moments also remained in the collective memory of the participants as wonderful experiences.
Spurred on by inquiries from federal circles, exciting collaboration on the source code, and the success of the conference, Adfinis began to look for a strong partner in the document editing environment in order to jointly support customers in using the open source office solution of the future.
Then as now, Collabora Productivity stood for sound specialist knowledge, stability and openness – values and characteristics that are also central to Adfinis, and so the choice to partner together was quickly made. As the largest contributor to the LibreOffice codebase, creator of the browser-based Collabora Online and with a large number of successful customer projects, Collabora Productivity is the industry leader in the Open Source document editing environment. Combined with our expertise as a system integrator, Adfinis and Collabora Productivity can serve customers internationally with a best-in-class service. Adfinis is extremely pleased that the partnership agreement signed in August 2014 has now connected us for 10 years.
Innovative projects, joint developments and many years of experience
As an open source service provider, Adfinis works with many manufacturers and learns first-hand when customers have problems with a product or want additional functions added to a product. To this end – Adfinis and Collabora Productivity have worked together on various improvements to the LibreOffice code base in recent years.
Better texts thanks to LanguageTool integration
The need for a better spell checker, which both corrects grammar and improves the style of text, prompted Adfinis to strive for a native LanguageTool integration in LibreOffice. This resulted in a collaboration with LanguageTool, and together we got the project rolling with Collabora Productivity engineers developing the code, as Adfinis helped to organise the necessary financial resources. The resulting integration can now be used by all users and an on-premise installation for sensitive and critical data is possible as well. More details here.
Increased efficiency thanks to simple translations using DeepL
The need for content translations has also grown in recent years due to Adfinis’ international growth. Tedious copying of text from LibreOffice to DeepL and back was not efficient in the long term. Adfinis therefore decided to engage Collabora Productivity again to enable the DeepL translation function in both Collabora Online and LibreOffice. More details here.
Development of the iOS platform
At the 2014 LibreOffice conference in Bern, CloudOn had shown that open source document editing had a place in the then newly developed iOS mobile platform. Unfortunately, their innovative project disappeared after their acquisition by Dropbox, and for a long time there was no further progress made around the integration of an open source office solution for iOS. Years later, however, an Adfinis customer had this exact need, and Collabora responded by investing to implement a port of Collabora Online to iOS on an expedited timeline with financial support from Adfinis and others. The resulting code is now available as open source and the app can be installed via the Apple Store. More details here.
This project further illustrates the unique character of the partnership between Adfinis and Collabora Productivity – creating interconnected islands of open technology in the ocean of proprietary platforms, and contributing to further digital self-determination and openness.
A glimpse into the future
While the technological area of office software is now more about evolutions than revolutions, operating models and collaboration approaches are currently undergoing major changes. With easier access to more solutions thanks to “as a service” models, and the new possibilities of browser-based products, there has been a strong shift towards cloud-based offerings in recent years. Office software is also often used directly in the cloud today (“Hello GDocs”). But when critical data is involved, the issue of dependency must be considered and the call for digital self-determination and digital sovereignty is louder.
Collabora Office and Collabora Online meet all the standards of transparent and trustworthy software: The source code is subject to free licenses and is therefore openly accessible and auditable. The solutions can be operated on your own infrastructure and, of course, the code can also be compiled and packaged yourself, which can effectively prevent against supply chain attacks as well.
Looking to the future, these advantages will be of essential importance when it comes to providing solutions for IT areas processing personal data or with other critical requirements. The German government’s openDesk project, lead by ZenDiS, shows the political will to become more independent from individual major players and to strengthen local expertise in order to not only operate but also develop digitally sovereign solutions. Adfinis has been a pioneer for open and self-controlled IT platforms for almost 25 years, has invested a lot in this area and is in close contact with the openDesk project.
Adfinis is a key player in advancing digital sovereignty, equipped with the expertise to help organizations tackle the challenges of secure digitization. While it’s true that market-leading solutions are not always fully replaceable by open source alternatives, a combination of tools from our partners Nextcloud, Element, Open-Xchange, OpenProject, and Collabora Online enables the creation of robust collaboration platforms that integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructures. This approach ensures that the risk of intellectual property leakage – whether through inclusion in LLM training data or unauthorized third-party access – can be effectively eliminated.
Are you interested in discovering how your organization can build an environment that enhances your existing infrastructure, safeguards against data leakage, and ensures emergency operations without relying on external services or cloud providers? Contact us, and we’ll demonstrate what’s achievable with open source solutions that you can fully manage within your own infrastructure.
Achieving great things together
As we look to the future, it is vital for organizations to consider the importance of privacy and the risks of vendor dependency. In a digital world increasingly dominated by proprietary solutions, true freedom of choice only exists when open, interoperable technologies are consistently adopted. These solutions ensure data security, minimize vendor lock-in, and give organizations control over their digital environments. Open source has won the browser market – most servers have been operating on Linux for many years now, billions of cell phones run all thanks to Linux, and also the growing interest in Linux on the desktop has become a reality.
At Adfinis, we are working with Collabora to create a future where personal data truly stays personal. This partnership is not only inspiring, but also highly motivating and professional. We are committed to ensuring that self-hosted solutions remain available in critical environments, promoting a world built on innovative, sustainable and resilient open source technologies.
– Nicolas Christener, CEO Adfinis
Adfinis will continue to accelerate this trend and invest in partnerships such as the one with Collabora Productivity. By working together, we will continue to deliver open source solutions that empower organizations to safeguard their data, protect their privacy, and achieve greater independence in the digital landscape.
Thank you Michael Meeks, Miklos Vajna, Andras Timar, Cor Nouws, Eloy Crespo, Jan Holesovsky, Naomi Obbard, Pedro Silva, Tomaz Vajngerl, Tor Lillqvist and the whole Collabora team for the amazing partnership!
We extend our gratitude to all our customers who collaborate with us in shaping a future of innovative, sustainable, and resilient IT solutions based on reliable Open Source technology. A special thanks goes to our customer the Swiss Federal Court, whose leadership serves as a beacon of openness in the public sector.
