Deutsche Telekom picks Collabora Online
An open source online office suite is now available to Telekom customers in Germany and Austria.
Open source fans will be familiar with Collabara Online, which offers a cloudbased office suite based on LibreOffice
apps. Collabora contributes code to LibreOffice
but also bases its business model around offering its services to businesses who don’t necessarily want to trust private documents to the likes of Office365 and Google Workspace.
Collabara offers its suite as an online service to businesses, billed on a per user basis. Its suite can also be installed on local servers.
Deutsche Telekom has taken this a step further by offering its existing MagentaCLOUD users Nextcloud Office, which is built together with Collabara Productivity.
Like MagentaCLOUD itself, Nextcloud Office
is based in Deutsche Telekom’s own Open Telekom cloud. As this is based in the EU, all information held must comply with European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations). Nextcloud itself is also open source, so in theory no proprietary code is used in this IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and SaaS (software as a service). Individuals and businesses are free to set up their own Nextcloud/Collabara instance on their business servers but they then need to take on the responsibility of securing and maintaining them, versus having the lion’s share of the work done by their local telecoms provider.
If you want to open source your cloud-based office suite, you may have little choice, though, as currently this service is only being offered to Deutsche Telekom clients in German-speaking countries. Still, the telecoms giant also owns the US firm T-Mobile, so American readers can only hope that Nextcloud Office will be rolled out there, too. For more on Collabora, see page 90.