Introduction to COOL
If you have to look up what COOL means… Nah, we did, too. It’s how all this arcane office-in-a-browser stuff works.
If you’re reading this magazine, you’re probably already familiar with LibreOffice, the free, open source office suite. What you may not be aware of is that there’s an Enterprise edition (which many tight-fisted businesses avoid paying for). In fact, there are a few enterprise editions and support options from different players, each one a good reason for businesses to front some dollar. Most relevant for this feature is Collabora Office, brought to you by the similarly named Linux consultancy powerhouse. We featured Collabora Office in our interview in LXF302 (and indeed in our Finding Equi-Libre-um feature back in LXF288), but let’s start with a quick recap.
Firstly, Collabora Office does not have any features that aren’t present in the regular edition. This is an important point. Collabora Office exists so that successful businesses can help the project financially, as well as get the support they’d expect from such an arrangement. Next, Collabora Office has a companion, Collabora Online. This is an engine that rather impressively leverages Nextcloud’s document sharing and storage capabilities to provide a cloud office solution that gives Google’s Workspace and Microsoft’s Office Online a run for their money.
Keep your COOL
Collabora Online isn’t just for big businesses, though; there’s a free version called Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE), aimed at home users and small teams. This doesn’t come with the stability guarantees or support of the former, but the price is right. And new features are added to CODE all the time, where they’re tested and eventually promoted to Collabora Online. All of these projects are developed under the aegis of COOL – Collabora Office OnLine.
If you want to learn more about the birth (and subsequent development) of this, check out some of the COOL Days archived talks on YouTube.
Our aim in this feature is to help you get Nextcloud and CODE running on a home (or remote) server that you can access from anywhere. You’ll be able to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations with your friends, co-workers or (if you like) complete strangers. Who knows, maybe we’ll free you and your online document wrangling from the scourge of Big Tech.
As you can imagine, this will take some work, so do prepare yourself with a thermos of tea before turning the page. Don’t be daunted – we’re going to make the setup as simple as possible. Starting from an Ubuntu install (such as the lightweight server we made in LXF303 Lightweight Ubuntu), we’ll add a LAMP stack (or at least the AMP – Apache, MySQL and PHP – components). Then we’ll install Nextcloud and set it up behind a TLS-terminating reverse proxy. This impressive-sounding gadget means we’ll only need to worry about one SSL certificate chain, while also making it easy to run both Nextcloud and CODE securely on the same machine. We’ll assume that you’re familiar with SSHing into remote machines. It’s possible, but of limited use, to do all this on your desktop machine. So, we’ll assume you are either running on a VPS or a home server. Furthermore, since Nextcloud and CODE both require a FQDN (fully qualified domain name) to function, we’ll assume that you are OK managing DNS records.