This feature has been retired. The Collabora / LibreOffice Online editor is no longer offered to people using the web app, and the dedicated editor appliance it needed is no longer part of a Foldr deployment.
In-browser editing is now handled by Foldr Bureau, which is built into Foldr itself.
This page is kept because links to it are still out in the world. If you arrived looking for the old setup steps, what you probably want is below.
What replaced it
Foldr Bureau opens Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations and text files directly in the browser, and edits them there with the editors switched on. The practical differences from the old LibreOffice Online arrangement:
- No separate appliance. Bureau runs in the browser as part of Foldr. There’s no second virtual machine to deploy, size, patch or put in DNS.
- No conversion. The old editor loaded a document into LibreOffice and wrote it back out. Bureau edits the original file, so the parts nobody touched come back exactly as they went in.
- Nothing leaves your storage. That was already true of a self-hosted LibreOffice Online, and it’s still true. Nothing is sent to Microsoft or Google either.
- Editors are per format. You choose whether documents, spreadsheets, presentations and text files are editable, rather than getting all of them together.
- Co-editing is a choice. LibreOffice Online allowed several people into a document with no configuration. Bureau holds a file for one person unless you switch co-editing on, per format and per share. See co-editing documents in Foldr Bureau.
Bureau’s editors are currently beta and say so in Foldr Settings. The viewers are finished work and are safe to leave on for everyone.
Where the settings are now
Foldr Settings > Integrations > Foldr Bureau, with a tab for each kind of file. Enabling Foldr Bureau walks through the switches.
The old Integrations > Collabora/LibreOffice Online page is gone.
I still have an editor appliance running
If your deployment predates Bureau, you may still have a virtual machine that only ever ran the LibreOffice Online role. Nothing in Foldr sends work to it any more, so it’s doing nothing but consuming a couple of vCPUs and several gigabytes of memory.
Before you decommission it, the usual care applies: check nothing else was quietly installed on it over the years, take a snapshot, power it down for a week or two rather than deleting it outright, and tidy up the internal DNS record that pointed at it. If you’re not sure whether something still depends on it, get in touch and we’ll go through it with you.
Is anything lost?
Two things, and it’s worth being straight about them.
The old editor could open Open Document formats. Bureau works with the Microsoft formats and with text, so an estate that genuinely lives in .odt and .ods should keep using desktop applications for those files.
And LibreOffice Online offered collaborative editing on everything, immediately. Bureau’s co-editing covers all four formats but is off until you enable it, and it holds up to ten people in a spreadsheet, presentation or text file. In practice that’s a limit few people meet, but it’s a limit and the old editor didn’t advertise one.
Against that, you get an editor with no appliance to run and saves that don’t rewrite the parts of a file nobody touched. For nearly every deployment that was the trade worth making.