Press Release: Collabora Online 26.04 Celebrates 10th Year with Release Adding Richer Document Features and AI Assistance

Collabora Productivity released Collabora Online 26.04, marking the open-source editor's 10th anniversary with over 115 million downloads, adding optional AI assistance across Writer, Calc, and Impress that keeps customer data under their control, along with richer document comparison, review workflows, and accessibility improvements. CEO Michael Meeks said the release delivers digital sovereignty for document collaboration with enterprise support.

This is a text-based press release. View the full release blog here. Major annual release marks ten years of Collabora Online and includes optional integrated AI assistance, richer document comparison and review workflows and advances in document interoperability. July 23, 2026 at 11:00 pm UTC / 13:00 pm CEST / 7.00 am ET / 4.00 am PT Cambridge, UK / Hamburg, Germany, July 23, 2026 – Today, Collabora Productivity unveils the enterprise-ready release for Collabora Online, the open source collaborative document editor with professional service-level agreements SLA and technical support. Collabora Online, part of the Collabora Office product portfolio, is the culmination of a year of development and refinement based on partner and user feedback. Collabora Online celebrates ten years of development this year with over 115 million downloads worldwide. Organisations integrate Collabora’s office suite into their existing infrastructure, while partner platforms can integrate Collabora Online into their products for powerful, secure and compliant collaborative document editing. This 10th anniversary release pairs Collabora Online’s established strengths with substantial new capabilities. Leading the way is optional AI assistance across Writer, Calc, and Impress, helping teams draft and refine documents, analyse spreadsheet data, and shape presentations. Importantly, customers retain full control over the use of AI as well as the model and infrastructure behind it. This is complemented by richer document comparison and review workflows for complex documents, new filter, functions and formatting in Calc, more reliable collaborative presenting, continued improvements to file format interoperability in Microsoft OOXML and Open Document Formats , and significant accessibility work reflected in Collabora Online’s successful BITV 2.0 accessibility audit for Writer. “Across Europe and the world, Collabora Online is the trusted, robust, open source office suite for businesses and organisations seeking digital sovereignty for their document collaboration. We deliver a beautiful, secure and compliant document editor through our partners to joint customers combined with enterprise support from our global team of expert engineers.” — Michael Meeks, CEO of Collabora Productivity Feature Highlights in Collabora Online 26.04 Built-in AI Assistant Based on customer feedback, integrated AI-assistance is now available across Writer, Calc, and Impress. AI support is built directly into the editing experience to assist with drafting, spreadsheet analysis, formula troubleshooting, and presentation preparation. Critically, this integration is entirely under the customer’s control and is off by default. Organisations choose which AI capability to enable, if any, and can safely connect their preferred commercial API provider or deploy a custom, self-hosted LLM within their own infrastructure. There is no mandated vendor and no requirement to send data outside an organisation’s chosen environment, keeping AI adoption aligned with existing data governance, security, and compliance policies. Smarter Review & Document Workflow Document review workflows also see substantial gains for organisations handling contracts, policy documents, and other high-value documents. For instance: Compare & Merge: A significantly enhanced document comparison tool highlights insertions, deletions, moved content, and formatting changes as clear, colour-coded redlines together with author and timestamp details. Restricted Review Mode: A new mode that enables administrators to grant reviewers the ability to accept or reject tracked changes without exposing broader editing permissions. Markdown Support: Writer now supports Markdown import and export, making it easier to move between document editing and documentation-oriented workflows, as well as AI generated styled text. Accessibility Enhancements Accessibility remains a core focus for enterprise and public sector deployments. 26.04 has extensive improvements to screen reader support, keyboard navigation, and dialog labelling across apps. The Accessibility features in Writer have passed a BITV 2.0 audit, based on Germany’s federal accessibility authority’s guidelines, reinforcing its suitability for organisations with strict compliance obligations. Document Interoperability Gains Interoperability with Microsoft OOXML file formats has significantly improved.Ongoing rendering and validation testing across hundreds of thousands of test documents has improved document round trips when files move between Collabora Online and proprietary office suites, such as Microsoft Office. For organisations migrating away from proprietary platforms, this translates into fewer formatting surprises and a much smoother transition. Productivity Improvements Beyond AI, there are many productivity gains across the suite. Calc adds new modern spreadsheet functions, and ready-made table styles. Impress gains more dependable collaborative presenting with Follow-Me Slide shows, which includes the ability to independently scroll back during a live presentation. Users benefit from a new in-app Options dialog for easily customising dictionaries and less hunting for document signing and interface changes. Administrators have the ability to set documents to open in view-only mode by default, reducing the risk of unintended changes across large deployments. Try Collabora Online 26.04 Now The latest version of Collabora Online is available to test now in our free demo /demo . Note: Demo builds are pre-release versions and may include unstable features. They are not representative of final production performance. Community and Acknowledgements Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Online code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to all the historic contributors to the underlying technology upon which Collabora Online is built. This all contributes to our mission to “Make Open Source Rock”, while also being a sustainable, growing business. All of our code is open source and available to the public on our Gerrit server. Join the Collabora Online Community http://www.collaboraoffice.org/ , take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum. European Open Source Industry Backs Collabora Online “Collabora Online is a core part of HCL Domino Workspace’s modern, fully sovereign collaboration platform, and will be available in our first release as the office suite our customers use to co-author and share documents. This next 26.04 release continues to raise the bar for Domino Workspace customers who will be able to deploy it over the next few months on-premises, in a private cloud, or in a sovereign cloud of their own choosing. Our organisations are both committed to giving our customers full, uncompromising control over their data privacy.” — Partner Quote: Richard Jefts, Executive Vice President, HCLSoftware https://www.hcl-software.com “We value our partnership with Collabora and the innovation they bring in secure, open source document collaboration. With their latest release, we’re pleased to see extensive improvements in document interoperability, which Adfinis supports with server power for automated testing. Customers shouldn’t have to choose between the latest technology and full control over their own data. We’re proud to support solutions that deliver on both.” — Partner Quote: Nicolas Christener, CEO of Adfinis /partners/adfinis “Arawa is pleased to see Collabora incorporating feedback from our joint French customers in government, public administration and education into this milestone release. The new AI assistance, with customers firmly in control of their model and infrastructure, is something our clients from different sectors have requested. The accessibility and interoperability improvements will make an immediate difference for them as well and help increase end user adoption. We look forward to continuing to contribute to Collabora Online’s future.” — Partner Quote: Guy-Christian, Head of Operations, Arawa /partners/arawa “Nextcloud welcomes the arrival of enterprise support for the 26.04-based release of Nextcloud Office through our long-standing partnership with Collabora. Our customers who choose to upgrade will enjoy the great improvements in performance, accessibility, and interoperability as well as integration with Nextcloud’s privacy-first, sovereign AI.” — Partner Quote: Frank Karlitschek, CEO and Founder, Nextcloud /partners/nextcloud “We are delighted to see our integration partner Collabora taking this important step forward with Collabora Online 26.04. The enhanced performance and feature set drives an even more polished user experience. Collabora is a great partner for us with their excellent product and clear dedication to open source. That enables our join customers to take back control of their data ” — Partner Quote: Klaas Freitag, CTO of OpenCloud /partners/opencloud “The latest release continues to demonstrate the best integration, feature set and stability for ownCloud users. Paired with the accessibility and interoperability gains in this release, it’s a natural fit for the sovereign, federated collaboration we’ve built ownCloud around.” — Partner Quote: David Walter, VP, Open Source Program Office & Special Projects at ownCloud – a Kiteworks Company /partners/owncloud “It is great to see the continued progress Collabora is making on their fully open source, interoperable and ever-more intuitive Office suite. Collabora makes a really important contribution to digital sovereignty and the whole Open Source Ecosystem, and Univention has worked successfully together with Collabora for many years. With 26.04, the accessibility improvements and customer-controlled AI assistance, mark a major step forward.” — Partner Quote: Peter Ganten, CEO of Univention GmbH /partners/univention “Our strategic partnership with Collabora is focused on digital sovereignty and interoperability. The 26.04 release is a strong step forward packed with new features that will enable organisations to benefit from more intelligent document workflows and increasingly productive document editing. Collabora Online reinforces our mission to provide secure, interoperable collaboration for organisations that cannot compromise on control, transparency, or jurisdiction.” — Partner Quote: Benjamin Schilz, CEO of Wire /partners/wire “Collabora Online helps our knowledge management customers gain fully-featured document editing without ever leaving XWiki. We are pleased to see 26.04’s accessibility and interoperability gains making that experience even stronger.” — Partner Quote: Ludovic Dubost, Founder & CEO of XWiki SAS /partners/xwiki Press Interview Opportunities – Michael Meeks Michael is CEO of Collabora Productivity, Collabora’s Office division. He leads the Collabora Online and Office products, supporting customers and partners alongside his extremely talented team. He has served as a founder and Director of The Document Foundation and has contributed to both ODF and OOXML standardisation. Prior to Collabora Productivity he gained a breadth of experience as a Novell/SUSE Distinguished Engineer working on various pieces of Free Software infrastructure across the Linux stack from the base-system, boot-time and CORBA to Evolution, GNOME, MeeGo, Nautilus, and Open Source accessibility, among many others. Michael Meeks is available for interview to discuss the launch of the product. Please email the Marketing team to arrange access. About Collabora Productivity Collabora Productivity provides Collabora Online: an open-source solution for document editing and collaboration, complemented by desktop and mobile apps for seamless multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity provides support subscriptions via hundreds of trusted partners worldwide. Together, they deliver document and productivity excellence integrated with our partners’ product and service offerings. Focusing strongly on Open Source, Digital Sovereignty and GDPR compliance, Collabora Productivity and partners deliver a secure, interoperable solution for deploying in organisations at scale. Contact Naomi Manvell, Head of Marketing marketing@collaboraoffice.com Chris Thornett, PR chris.thornett@collabora.com Collabora Productivity St Johns Innovation Centre Cowley Road Cambridge CB4 0WS United Kingdom