Kollaborate Server 3.0 - redesigned UI, Documents, Transcripts, Servers page and more

Recently we released Kollaborate Server 3.0, a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform. This follows on from the release of Kollaborate 3.0 on the cloud version of the site.

New UI

We've made many changes to improve the user interface, the most significant of which is the vertical navigation bar which is designed to balance out the interface and place your content closer to the center of the screen.

If you find yourself needing more horizontal space, hover over the Kollaborate logo at the top left and click the arrow that appears to collapse the navigation bar. The navigation bar will automatically collapse by itself on small displays or when you resize your browser window.

Documents

While video is the most popular format used on the site, our customers also upload many other file types such as MS Word and PowerPoint documents. The only way to view these files in the past was to download them.

Now Kollaborate has a specific Document file type that supports file extensions like PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, ODT, ODP. These files will now show thumbnails and be viewable directly in the browser once converted by our servers.

Leaving a comment on a document now tags that comment with the current page number and clicking on a comment will immediately take you to that page.

New Servers page

Encoding server configuration has been moved to its own separate page of the Admin Area.

Moving encoding servers to their own page allows us to offer more settings and features in future, including Kollaborate Hybrid Cloud, which will allow you to offset some of your encoding and other tasks to our servers. We plan to launch this feature in the near future.

Transcript tab

Add transcripts to your videos either manually or by importing SRT or VTT captions. Export as SRT, VTT or plain text. Captions will appear automatically over your video.

The cloud version of the site has a beta of our machine learning-powered automatic transcription feature. Because this is still a beta and is regularly undergoing changes, we're not making it available to self-hosted customers just yet but plan to in future once things have stabilized a bit more.

Customizable file columns

Columns in List view on the Files page can now be resized or dragged to change their order. You can also right-click to hide them or show additional columns. You can now, for example, show the number of comments a file has next to its name and sort the list by this field.

Advanced Search

Advanced Search has been completely overhauled to be more powerful. Use criteria like file size, type or width to narrow down your search. You can even locate files with specific words in their transcript.

Overhauled image viewer

Images can now be zoomed and navigated with a lot more control than before. Annotations can be drawn over the image at any zoom level.

Version names

Versions can be given custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut". To do this, click the purple number next to the filename to view all of the versions, then right-click a version and select Rename Version.

Comment attachments

Even though you can leave comments at specific timecode positions and draw over a video, sometimes that isn't enough to get your point across, so you can now attach files to comments. So you can say "I want the color to look like this" and attach a photo, rather than trying to describe it.

This release also contains hundreds of small tweaks, bug fixes and improvements.

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).