What we're planning for Kollaborate in 2025

We’ve become aware that Kollaborate’s existing architecture makes certain features hard to deliver, so after considering all available options we recently embarked on a Rust rewrite of the backend.

The benefits of rewriting in Rust are improved performance, increased reliability, greater efficiency / better use of resources,
and much greater control of the overall experience. We have focused so far on areas where a lot of data was being processed, such as delivering media files and thumbnails, as well as downloading a folder as a zip file, and have seen noticeable performance increases.

Some of the features the new backend will eventually enable are a public API (for self-hosting), background file transfers, and WebDAV support, among many others. For self-hosted customers, it will also eventually offer simpler licensing and an openly-accessible trial version. We have also laid the groundwork for a lot of features that we will enable once we are less reliant on the old backend. We’re still working on rewriting backend parts in Rust, but when we’re ready to start converting user-facing areas of the site we will be conducting a big UI overhaul.

This project will take a long time to complete, but we’ve structured it in such a way that the old and new backends can run concurrently and we can switch features over to the new version as and when they become available. We will be releasing a preview version soon for self-hosted customers and will be rolling it out to the cloud in the next couple of months.

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).