Limited functionality with Collabora Office
Problem reported by Gerardo Altman - 10/8/2025 at 2:45 AM
Not A Problem
Hi All

Not sure where the best place to post this is but wanted to share our experience as these issues will need to be solved before we can offer Collabora Office + NextCloud integration to be able to compete with O365 services.

We've been using Collabora + NC for a long time the integration is right up there for document management + editing + collaboration with multiple users.

For the SM service to be well accepted by users as an alternative to O365 + MS online apps and even Google Workspace the document editing and connecting to external storage needs to be improved.

ATM we are running the latest release as of SM today October 8th 2025.

- connecting to NC is very slow, the servers are sitting on the same host so there is no reason for this latency to index.
- SM > Storage > NC > not able to edit files located on nextcloud storage with Collabora Office
- no preview available for files on NC
-- this is limited to download a file only.

- SM > not able to edit files that are attachments in an email, only preview is available which is very limited.
- in contrast if the file is stored locally in SM > storage > then the doc can be edited in Collabora Office.

if we are missing some setting to enable these standard functions please advise happy to review.

""G
Derek Curtis Replied
Employee Post
Our goal is to increase the functionality of document collaboration integrations across multiple areas. In addition, integrating with NextCloud is on our roadmap. 

Personally, I've found Collabora to be very...archaic when compared to OnlyOffice. But, that may just be me. Personal preference and all that. 
Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
Gerardo Altman Replied
Hey Derek

Thanks for replying.

I've also used OO in the past had run into some serious issues with document corruption that was not resolved at the time which was what pushed us into looking at other options.

The OO licensing model at the time was also quiet restrictive based on number of connections so if you had multiple tabs open with docs each doc was a connection.

There are no such limits with collabora.

This was about 4 years ago and since swapping to Collabora we haven't looked back.

What is/ was it about collabora that made it feel archaic ?

I'm always interested in understanding feedback from a wider audience.

Once SM is able to add the above features which are very minimal base functions we can then do a POC with clients to compete against o365, without the basic above items there is no way forward at this time.

Do we have a general time line for the mentioned improvements ?

Within a year, 6 months 3 months?

Anything we can do to assist with the process ?

""Cheers
G

Director Of Problem Solving

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