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LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

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Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#51

Post by ucaetano »

aikah wrote: post #48
ucaetano wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that will be the same 10 years from now? 15? It takes a lot of time to change an installed base, but that ship has sailed already.

> Do you believe that will be the same 10 years from now? 15? It takes a lot of time to change an installed base, but that ship has sailed already. Try working with a 200 MB document in Google Docs or Onedrive .Do you really think people that have to work 8 hours a day on such documents can afford a web app being slow and unresponsive ? There will always be a place for native apps. Yes the web is getting better, but…

Oh yeah, there will always be a place. But that's not what really matters, but the size of that place. Cloud-based productivity systems can replace native apps for over 90% of all corporate functions (marketing, HR, sales, etc.).

Sure, you'll still need native systems for a few heavy functions (finance will keep on using excel for quite a while), but most of the use cases don't need a full-sized productivity suite.

Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#52

Post by chmars »

pidg wrote: post #36
chmars wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which collaboration features? (Seriously: We use desktop versions of Office apps based on Office 365 but I have not discovered any collaboration features so far. Where are they hidden? Are they compliant with European data privacy and labor law?)

I don't know enough about the admin side, but perhaps it's something that needs to be enabled separately. From a user perspective it 'just works' in our office: If several people open a document shared on OneDrive, that document is opened in a collaboration mode where you can see others working on it, similar to Google Drive. A menu appears at the bottom of the screen[1] showing who's editing that file. If you have L…

Thank you!

Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#53

Post by cubancigar11 »

spdionis wrote: post #24
lucb1e wrote: post #3

From the demo I saw, it worked as well as watching 1080p YouTube in a third world country. Someone figured it was smart to do server-side rendering and load your document as tiles using a technology designed for maps (the same as used in OpenStreetMap, and there it works well, because that's actually a map and not a document). The person argued WiFi was bad, but when typing on a 100mbps symmetric connection there was…

> implying that watching youtube in 1080p is not easier in third world countries compared to first world... (looking at you Europe).

You are modded down but internet in India is faster AND cheaper than USA.

Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#54

Post by dorfsmay »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #40
douche wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been pleasantly surprised with the online versions of Word and Excel in the past year or so. I don't do anything fancy with them, but it actually feels like a nicer experience than firing up the desktop versions - I do try to keep all my docs in OneDrive, which helps. The one thing they really need to work on, for me to be super happy, would be their Lync/Skype platform. Either overhaul the old Lync 2013 client…

They're basically killing Lync and making a combined Skype client that can log into multiple "Skype" accounts, including what Skype for Business is (aka Lync). Its part of their complete rewrite of Skype (that started with the Windows 10 combined Skype/messaging app that is currently in semi-beta that came out with Threshold 2).

Are they no longer using SIP at all?

Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#55

Post by vezzy-fnord »

ucaetano wrote: post #51
aikah wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you believe that will be the same 10 years from now? 15? It takes a lot of time to change an installed base, but that ship has sailed already. Try working with a 200 MB document in Google Docs or Onedrive .Do you really think people that have to work 8 hours a day on such documents can afford a web app being slow and unresponsive ? There will always be a place for native apps. Yes the web is getting better, but…

Oh yeah, there will always be a place. But that's not what really matters, but the size of that place. Cloud-based productivity systems can replace native apps for over 90% of all corporate functions (marketing, HR, sales, etc.). Sure, you'll still need native systems for a few heavy functions (finance will keep on using excel for quite a while), but most of the use cases don't need a full-sized productivity suite.

You could just as easily use a lightweight native productivity suite. None of the arguments you're making imply web-based solutions in of themselves.

Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#56

Post by ucaetano »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #43
ucaetano wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that will be the same 10 years from now? 15? It takes a lot of time to change an installed base, but that ship has sailed already.

In tech, all things old are new again every 10 years or so. You can't ever say "that ship has sailed."

Sure you can, concepts survive, but the companies that implemented them in a certain way don't. Things will move to the server and back probably an endless number of times in the future, and each time, a large score of companies will become irrelevant and die off.

Take pagers, the concept (delivering messages) still exists, but the mass market for dedicated, dumb message receivers disappeared a long time ago, leaving only a few niches.

Any company doing a mass-market, native-only, offline-only office productivity suite is bound to fade into oblivion, unless it changes. And that's the point of my original post, LibreOffice is going exactly through that.

Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#58

Post by vidarh »

pidg wrote: post #30
Majestic121 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously using the "lock in" argument against open standards? Is this a joke? You could not be more locked in than when using the Office 365 suite. It may happen to have some nice feature for now, but there is nothing keeping them from pulling an IE all over again, and you will be completely locked in because of the proprietary format used.

No, not against open standards. Microsoft OOXML is an open format. You might recall it's (controversially) the Ecma, ISO and IEC standard format, and is supported by LibreOffice and OpenOffice. So even if MS did something terrible, the documents would still be editable when everyone switches over to LibreOffice - dependent on how well they've implemented OOXML. And I'm not even against what Collabora are doing, I thi…

As far as I'm aware there are no complete implementations of OOXML other than Microsoft Office, and given the complexity of the specification and the huge gaping holes, it is unclear if it ever will be, or if it is even possible to implement for parties other than Microsoft without reverse engineering large chunks of Microsoft Office.

Until there are other complete implementations, calling it an open format is pretty much a bad joke.

> I just don't think LibreOffice stands up to MS Office as a product

That may be so. But a government has many other requirements than the day to day use. They also, for example, have archiving requirements (with timelines measured in decades) that are hard enough to deal with without the risks incurred of locking documents into poorly documented formats only fully supported by a single vendor.

Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#59

Post by ucaetano »

downtide wrote: post #44
ucaetano wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can all agree that you're not representative of the market, and to be honest, I'd guess (with no data to back it up) that the majority of readers here aren't as well.

I wouldn't say I was representative of the market. But I would like a good product. How do you define the market?

People who would like a product/service and are willing to pay enough (in the required scale) for that product/service to exist.

The current core market for office productivity suites are business, followed by consumer. And I'd bet only a very small minority of those are sticking with plain text files until something better comes along.

Re: LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365

#60

Post by workitout »

scholia wrote: post #17
coldtea wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a bit sad to see LibreOffice struggling to maintain relevance when the market it tried to address suddenly became nearly nonexistent. If you mean that we've moved from desktop office apps to cloud-based Office apps that's absolutely not true. The numbers I've seen for Google Docs etc are insignificant compared to office workers using MS Office and the rest. People who think Cloud docs have "won" apparently don…

This is true. However, the cloud is part of Office 365's ecosystem play. You get the full-strength Office programs installed locally (Windows and Mac), plus the ability to work in the cloud, plus the mobile apps for Windows, iOS and Android. Even if "99% of office workers in enterprise/businesses/governments etc" do their work on the desktop, there's still some appeal to being able to get what you want where you want…

>> there's still some appeal to being able to get what you want where you want it

That implies most companies are willing to trust their business secrets to the cloud. That isn't what I see happening, not in medium sized business or enterprises.

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