Kollaborate Server 3.9.1 is now out, which is mainly a bug fix release but has some small new features.

Announcements

You can now add banners to the top of pages to communicate information to users. This could be information like tutorials or details about scheduled maintenance. You can add site-wide banners or just add them to specific pages. Banners support HTML input so you can add styling and URLs to banners.

Additionally, you can choose to add a full-page announcement to users upon their next login. This will show a page that they need to click past to get to the Projects page. This page will only appear once for users.

Announcements can be accessed from the Tools page in the Admin Area.

Share Dropdown

Clicking Share under the player now gives you a choice between sharing a new link or viewing existing links to a file, instead of creating a new link immediately.

The remaining changes are bug fixes and the full list of changes can be viewed here after logging in. There is also a corresponding Kollaborate Encoder 1.8.1 update that is required for compatibility with this Kollaborate Server version.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

A new major version of our self-hosted Kollaborate Server software is here, with many new features. Our goal in this update was expanding productivity by adding features that allow you to find what you're looking for faster.

File Tags

Add tags to files to give them new context. Click on a tag to view all other files with this tag.

Tags are also integrated with Workflows. You can have an Upload Workflow automatically add tags to a file if it meets certain criteria (e.g. adding a "vfx" tag if certain terms appear in its filename). File Workflows can add tags that can disappear when the file is assigned a different workflow, which is great for adding context-specific tags.

There are additional filters added to the Files page for viewing files with or without tags, which is useful for finding untagged files when you're tagging your entire project.

We've been testing this feature internally for a while and I can't overstate just how much of a game-changer file tags have been for my own projects.

Global Search

Need to find a file but don't know which project it's in? Global Search allows you to locate files in all projects you can access.

Comment Tagging

Team members can now tag other users in comments to get their attention and there is a new option in notification settings for managing mention alerts.

View by Last Comment

There is an optional Last Comment column that can be added to the Files page, allowing you to sort by the date of the most recent comment. There is also a filter on the Files page for files with unread comments (i.e. comments added since you last viewed the file). This filter is extremely useful for quickly catching up to activity on a large project.

New File Browser

We've created a new file browser which greatly improves performance over the old one, especially for very large projects.

Search and Sort by Duration

Advanced searches can now take into account the duration of a file, and a new Duration column can optionally be added to the Files table for sorting by duration.

Update Hold Timecode

When typing during playback, the comment area will "hold" the current timecode position. You can now move the playhead elsewhere, click the button next to the timecode and have it update to the new position.

Many more changes

Other changes include:

• Admin - Added a new Rebuild Caches tool
• Player - Hold is now reset if the user has only whitespace in the comment field
• Files - Allow filenames to span two lines if no status is set on the file
• Comments - Show link users when a comment is marked as "to-do" or "done"
• Uploaded AVIF images are now correctly recognized as images instead of generic files
• Saved Searches - Editing a saved search no longer requires you to do a Save As under the same name - now just click the Update button
• Projects - Project admins can now edit project tags
• Docker - Improved proxy performance
• Docker - Updated to Ubuntu 24.04
• UI - Overhauled multiple interface controls, most notably checkboxes, which now behave more consistently
• UI - Navigation links can now have sublinks for more easily locating important pages
• Alerts - Added a new alert when a file is uploaded to a File Request link
• Encoding - If more than one proxy type is set up and the workflow is set to remove the original file, the original file is removed only for the first proxy
• Sharing - Show name of link instead of original folder name to link recipients
• Sharing - Shared links are now removed when a file is moved between projects
• Player - Filters and searches are taken into account when showing the Next / Previous buttons
• UI - Show total storage space for all projects the user can access in the page footer (before this amount was project-relative)
• Sharing - Show search bar on folder links
• Permissions - Update terminology to clarify that the "access" permission corresponds to viewing others' files
• Uploads - Fixed an issue that was preventing uploads with matching filenames from automatically being placed in version stacks
• Uploads - Fixed thumbnail stretching on email alerts for file request links
• Player - Fixed an issue where video may be pillarboxed on wide displays
• Projects - Fixed an issue where deleting a project and then creating one with the same name would say the project still exists
• Sharing - Fixed an issue where Quick Share settings may not save when Quick Share is initiated from the player page
• Files - Fixed an issue where moving an empty folder might inadvertently move additional files
• Files - Fixed an issue where deleting a department with only an empty folder inside could delete additional files
• Encoding - Fixed an issue where encoding profile might not be sent to encoder
• Uploads - Bitrate now specifies Mbits instead of Mb, for clarity
• Uploads - Fixed filesize / bitrate being the wrong way around
• Files - Fixed an issue where making a change that causes a version stack item to update would incorrectly collapse the stack
• Trash - Fixed an issue where trash size would not be automatically updated when clearing out the trash automatically
• Tasks - Fixed an issue where editing or deleting a task could show an error
• Various UI tweaks and improvements
• General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

We've just released Kollaborate Server 3.8, a major update to our self-hosted workflow and collaboration platform.

Single-Sign On (Preview)

Kollaborate Server now supports Single-Sign On (SSO), allowing enterprise users to have logins handled by a third-party authentication provider. When logging in with the identity provider, Kollaborate will link the login to any user accounts that already exist with that email address or otherwise create the account transparently in the background.

In order to facilitate this we have completely redesigned the login page. It is now simpler, more consistent and more reliable.

UI Refresh

We've changed the UI theme to be darker and added new icons and fonts. There are far too many changes to document, but some include relocating the user dropdown to the sidebar, new interface controls, and improvements to the layout of the player page.

Higher-quality thumbnails

Thumbnail images are now displayed at a higher resolution. In order to facilitate this we've completely redesigned how we display thumbnails, resulting in numerous improvements including more consistent handling of non-16:9 frame sizes.

To convert your existing thumbnails, use the option to regenerate thumbnails for all files in the Tools page of the Admin Area.

New permissions

We've added two new user permissions: modifying others' files and modifying others' comments. This allows users to interact with others' assets without needing to be an admin.

Saved Searches

Advanced Searches can be saved and will appear as filters on the Files page.

(Note that we recommend saved searches are limited to the current folder in most cases. Searching the entire project should only be used for specific use-cases because it can be confusing to users when the filter is applied while navigating into subfolders.)

Template Projects

Create template projects that can be used to copy settings when creating new projects. The data that can be stored in a template are folder structures, saved searches, departments, team, tasks and workflows.

Custom Encoding Profiles

The encoding settings used by Kollaborate Encoder can be modified, allowing you to change bitrate, frame size and other settings. This requires Kollaborate Encoder 1.8 and can be set from the Admin Area of the webserver.

Note that while you can have Kollaborate Encoder create multiple proxies of different frame sizes, that is of limited utility right now because there is no way to switch between them and Kollaborate will always just play the highest-quality proxy. This will be more useful with features we are planning in future.

Other Changes:

• In-progress uploads are now stored on the storage volume instead of inside the webserver container. This solves issues if the webserver has limited storage space, with the added bonus of making the finishing stage much faster
• Admin - Overhauled the UI of the Tools page
• History is now shown in the project navigation bar to increase accessibility of this feature
• Upgrader - Database tables / columns that already exist are now ignored. This can solve issues where you may have ended up with a partial upgrade
• Admin - Added the ability to hide the Help link at the bottom of the page
• Player - Improved JKL key behavior to be more in line with NLEs
• Files - New filters: Uploaded by Me and Uploaded by Others
• Files - Only allow those with file modification permissions to manually set a file's workflow
• Custom file permissions feature has been removed. Please use departments to manage file access
• File rename events are now stored in history
• File move events for each individual file are stored in history when moving a folder
• History - Better support for accented user names
• Player - Original file extension is shown in the Metadata pane
• Files - Added the ability to import comments, metadata and captions by right-clicking a file on the Files page
• Upload Workflows - Fixed an issue where workflows set to the project root wouldn't apply inside departments
• Files - Fixed an issue where renaming a file and leaving the name unchanged would show an alert that the file already exists
• Files - Fixed an issue where it may exit file renaming unexpectedly if you rename immediately after uploading
• API - Fixed an issue where special characters in a folder name could cause duplicate folders to be created
• API - Fixed a crash when special characters exist in file title
• Advanced Search - Fixed an issue where "has versions" parameter wouldn't return results
• Files - Fixed an issue where version count wouldn't update when combining a new version
• Projects - Fixed controls overlapping long project descriptions
• Tasks - Fixed an issue where history description could be garbled
• Files - Upload speed is now shown in Mb/s
• Many small fixes and tweaks

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

Kollaborate Server 3.7 is a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform with thousands of code changes, mainly on the backend, to modernize and improve reliability. It also contains many new features, bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.

PHP 8.1 and MariaDB

This version updates PHP to version 8.1 and uses MariaDB instead of MySQL, both of which improve performance.

Trash

Deleting a file now moves it to the Trash, which can be accessed at the bottom of the screen.

Project admins can restore or empty the trash, otherwise those files will be removed automatically after 30 days.

User interface improvements

New controls for entering timecode and copying text.

Color and theme changes

Many optimizations to theming, including better support for light-colored interfaces. (You may need to rebuild your custom theme from the Tools section of the Admin Area for it to display correctly in this version.)

User administration

View stats for a user, such as the projects they are part of and how many files they have uploaded.

You can now suspend users, preventing them from using the site but keeping their files, comments, etc, intact.

Comment importing improvements

You can now map timecode, author and comment to specific columns within a CSV, as well as getting the author name from the file if the format supports it.

Comments can be imported and exported as TSV (Tab-Separated Values).

Require MFA

You can now require the user to have Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) activated before they can access a project. Edit a project to switch this option on.

There are many more changes and fixes; view the full list here.

Updated pricing

We've overhauled our pricing. Kollaborate Encoder is significantly cheaper and we've added new low-end packages with lower user counts to reduce the barrier to entry for smaller companies. (Existing customers are grandfathered into their old packages.)

At the current time of writing, we're offering a Black Friday Sale with 30% off all packages. This sale lasts through Cyber Monday (November 27th 2023).

If you'd like to try out Kollaborate Server before buying, please contact us for a trial.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview, register for the free cloud trial or contact us for a server trial.

Kollaborate Server 3.7 Beta 1 is now out. This version has a few new user-facing features but the biggest change is a signficant architectural overhaul. It has thousands of backend improvements and several key components have been rewritten. These changes improve reliability, customization and performance.

This version has been well tested and we're not aware of any issues, but we've given it a beta label due to the sheer number of changes that occurred.

We now support PHP 8.1 which provides performance improvements. The Docker images now use MariaDB instead of MySQL, which also improves database performance. Please note that the Docker image is configured to convert the database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise.

On the feature side of things, link recipients can now view captions, while history can be filtered and exported to a CSV file from the History page for a project.

We've also made numerous small UI changes including new interface controls for interacting with timecode, copying links and displaying thumbnails.

Some deprecated features have now been removed from the site: namely the App Storage section and Python scripting.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

We've just released Kollaborate Server 3.6.2, a minor update to our self-hosted file sharing and workflow management system.

The main features in this update are batch exporting of comments and captions, downloading of the current playback frame as an image, the option to import folder structures from an existing project when creating a new one, the option to search for a file by its age, and various user interface improvements.

Server-Specific Changes

• Added LimitRequestBody to .htaccess file for compatibility with recent versions of Apache
• Fixed an issue where avatars could not be uploaded
• Admin - Workflows - Fixed an issue where file workflows may not be editable
• Admin - Roles - Fixed a crash when deleting a role

Other Changes

• Comments - New comment design that is more space-efficient on narrower screens
• Files - Support for batch exporting captions and comments
• Player - Allow downloading the current frame as an image
• Projects - Added the ability to import folder structures from an existing project when creating a new one
• Advanced Search - Add option to search by age in days
• Preview - Remember previous volume setting for quick look previews
• Share - Added 21 day expiration option
• Metadata - Add extra frame rates to list on Edit Metadata page
• Transcript - Made caption overlap checking less strict
• Player - Show Actions button on mobile
• Player - Prompt before deleting comment annotations and attachments
• UI - Better support for popups on mobile screens
• Player - Comments and transcripts are no longer refreshed when the browser tab is not visible
• Files - Limit number of emails sent when a batch of files is moved at once
• Files - Prevent text box clicks from navigating to files/ folders when renaming
• Files - Prevent the rename textbox from appearing multiple times if the file is already being renamed
• Player - Improved the accuracy of timecode shown when hovering above play bar
• Captions - Fixed an issue where Premiere couldn't import SRTs and improved caption timing accuracy in general
• Comments - Fixed an issue where the first Davinci Resolve marker wouldn't be imported
• Download Folder - Fixed an issue preventing link recipients from downloading folders
• Files - Better logic for detecting the correct frame rate of a video if multiple frame rates are returned
• Files - Fixed an issue where renaming a version in a version stack would not reload the file correctly
• Files - Fixed an issue where a numeric filename like "1.20" could be shortened to "1.2"
• Player - Fixed a crash if reviewers are not accessible
• Player - Fixed a crash if user tries to view a file after the project has been deleted
• Adobe Panel - Various bug fixes and changes to how information is displayed
• UI - Various minor interface tweaks
• Various small bug fixes, optimizations and code modernizations

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

We've just released Kollaborate Server 3.6.1, a minor update to our self-hosted file sharing and workflow management system.

Server-Specific Changes

• Hardened default security settings
• The default installer password has been changed (only affects new installations)
• Admin Dashboard - An encoding job is now considered unassigned if the server has been removed or is offline
• Admin - Number of available encoding licenses is now shown on Servers page

Other Changes

• Player - All admins can now remove original files / proxies, not just the file's owner
• Comments - Right-click a comment and choose Copy Direct Link to copy a direct link to that comment. To send to someone outside the project, create a shared link as normal, then visit that link and copy the comment link from the player.
• Comments - Markers can now be imported from a CSV file (Timecode, Author, Comment format)
• Player - The maximum height of a vertical video is now dependent upon your screen size, to ensure it's always visible
• Files - Even though it is valid for a URL to contain an exclamation mark, some email apps interpret it as punctuation and mangle pasted folder URLs. This has now been prevented.
• Sharing - The default link name is now the title of the file
• Tasks - Various fixes for importing tasks from a CSV file
• Password Reset - Fixed an incompatibility with users with special characters in their email addresses
• Sharing - Fixed an issue where share link connection could be lost when an error appears on the screen
• Encoding Servers - Follow redirects when communicating with servers
• Files - More robust support for getting a file's frame rate
• Player - Ensured download info box is still visible on small size videos
• Various small bug fixes, optimizations and code modernizations

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

We've had some enquiries from customers about the Log4j vulnerability currently causing havoc across the internet. Log4j is a Java library and none of our products or backend processes use Java. Therefore, none of our products, including customers' self-hosted Kollaborate Server installations, are affected by this security flaw. (Self-hosted customers could still be vulnerable if they run other software on their servers that uses Log4j.)

Kollaborate Server 3.6 is out now - a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform.

Direct SMTP email sending

Kollaborate Server can now send emails directly using a user-supplied SMTP server, which is much more user-friendly than the old system utilizing Postfix. If you were using Postfix with a previous version, you will need to add your SMTP server information in the Configure page of the Admin Area to resume sending emails with version 3.6.

Your email provider will be able to supply information about connecting to their SMTP servers, or alternatively you can use Gmail or Amazon SES. Note that if you have two-factor authentication switched on with your email provider, you will likely need to set up an App-Specific Password for Kollaborate Server; your provider will be able to provide more details on this if it is necessary.

This is now our recommended way of sending emails from Kollaborate Server so we are also deprecating the Email Routing subscription service. This service will shut down in March 2022 (the exact date depends on your billing renewal date) and we have contacted affected customers about this directly. To avoid disruption, customers should upgrade to 3.6 and setup their SMTP information before the shutdown date.

Customize Default Workflows

The default workflows added automatically when creating a new project can now be customized from the Admin Area. Setup rules for automatically color coding files or complex approval chains that will be applied when the project is created.

(It should be noted that actions requiring specific files (such as adding a watermark image) cannot be set in default workflows as those files won't exist in new projects.)

Codec and track information in player

The Metadata tab in the player now shows information about the video codec of the original file and the audio track configuration. This information will not show for older files but will be gathered for all files uploaded from now on.

Set language on a per-file basis

The audio language setting is used to determine which caption language to show by default. Previously this could only be set on a project-wide basis but now can be overriden for specific files. This can be done from the Edit Metadata page.

Other Changes

• Admin Dashboard - Only calculate average encoding time for files from the last 24 hours
• Admin Dashboard - Fixed an issue where clearing the render queue doesn't requeue jobs correctly
• Admin Dashboard - Added the ability to clear failed encoding jobs only
• Fixed an issue where errors wouldn't be shown when creating a new user from the Admin interface
• Roles has been moved to the main navigation bar in the Admin Area
• You can now override the "From" name shown in emails from the Configure page (by default it is the site's name)
• Uploads - Show remaining upload count in page title
• History - Show file move events on the History page
• Share - Show the file upload link's description to users when uploading
• Player - Added n / p shortcut keys to go to next / previous file
• Fixed an issue causing potential conflicts with similar folder names
• Files - Various page performance improvements when navigating and uploading files
• Files - Fixed strange behavior when interacting with a file immediately after upload (e.g. favoriting or Quick Look)
• Player - Disabled browser player download button on mobile
• Files - Fixed page scrolling unnecessarily when dragging in files to upload
• Player - Fixed an error when subscribing / unsubscribing to a file
• Various minor fixes, code modernizations and refactorings

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

Kollaborate Server 3.5 was released last week - a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform.

As well as a massive under-the-hood overhaul, it introduces the following new features:

Security improvements

For improved security and privacy, we're now encrypting parts of the database. This happens automatically when running the upgrader for this release. Encryption keys are stored in config/keys.php and you will need to backup this file if you reinstall or move to a different server otherwise the database will be unreadable.

New admin tools

We've added new tools to the Admin Area to easily export a backup of the database, manage the number of days files remain in the trash and regenerate thumbnails if they are missing.

Project tags

You can now add tags to projects to categorize them, such as "in-progress" or tagging them with the name of the client. Clicking on a tag shows you other projects with that tag.

Multi-speed fast forward and rewind

Press J, K or L multiple times to increase or decrease rewind / fast forward speeds.

Edit custom department names

Department names can now be edited after they are created. Previously you would have to remove and re-add the department under a different name.

More export options

Captions can now be exported to CSV and comments can be exported to Reaper.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).