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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

#71

Post by jo909 »

martin-adams wrote: post #21
pidg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Office 365. I wasn't convinced until I actually started working at a company that uses it properly. The collaboration features in the native desktop apps work beautifully. Not having to endure emailed-round documents with multiple competing versions like "Report-Dec2015 Draft v5(FP,PL,KM) (2).doc" is worth the price of entry alone. I feel sorry for those like the UK government who've been successfully lobbied…

Documents in emails for you to review is devastating. I have a client who keeps doing it. The first thing I do is download it, upload it to Google Docs and turn on Suggestion Editing. Collaborative cloud based document editing is such a life saver.

How do you know if the sending party is okay with you uploading their document to a public cloud service?

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

#72

Post by kriro »

In principal I like this idea a lot. Office as a Service but in freer...sign me up.

As an aside I use LO as sort of a middleware for document conversion via PyOO (start headless LO, convert/load/creat documents etc. via Python script). I think UNO is rather complicated to use at least I struggle everytime I try to read the documentation (possible that I'm too dumb). I hope LO as a service helps make this use case more interesting and thus leads to more documentation and PyOO like libraries. I feel like there's some potential to get LO into more widespread use by improving/advertising the "headless LO" more.

Oh I'm building this webservice...yeah sure upload your files as Excel or Calcs...we can use that and create nice Calc documents from either one. Powered by LO.

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

#73

Post by bhouston »

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…

This also means that it is expensive to run this service, you can only do so much server side rendering per server, much much less than you can response to REST API calls with a little bit of JSON data as both Google Docs (and our service http://Clara.io do.)

This ownCloud service is bound to stay smallish until they embrace a true client side rendering approach.

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

#74

Post by noja »

unixhero wrote: post #70

Besides dude. Referring to poor countries as belonging to the third world implies that a second world exist. The second world collapsed with the Soviet Union and does not exist any longer. The preferred nomenclature is developing countries.

Yes. The Nth World countries name comes from NATO: third world are unaligned, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

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

#75

Post by douche »

dorfsmay wrote: post #54
DiabloD3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can't imagine that they would dump the SIP protocols that they are using now for Lync/Skype For Business - there's an enormous amount of work invested both by them, and by Plantronics, Avaya, Cisco, and all the other VOIP-phone vendors.

As of Skype for Business 2015, it's still SIP - S4B is more of a marketing maneuver than a real technical change. On the server side, applications built to integrate with Lync 2013 work seamlessly with S4B. The S4B client is just a reskin of the Lync 2013 client - it's a minor-minor revision number change, and still calls itself Lync 2013 on its About dialog.

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

#76

Post by mkrfox »

vidarh wrote: post #58
pidg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Word can work in the same formats LibreOffice uses. Microsoft even provides a chart so you know what to expect based on your choice: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Differences-between...

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

#77

Post by vidarh »

mkrfox wrote: post #76
vidarh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Word can work in the same formats LibreOffice uses. Microsoft even provides a chart so you know what to expect based on your choice: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Differences-between...

Yes, and that's one more reason not to use OOXML.

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

#78

Post by vidarh »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #41
r3bl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought Office 365 so I could have full MS Office compatibility while I'm using Linux (not saying LibreOffice is bad, I just sometimes need perfect compatibility). That didn't turn out to be a good idea. First of all, to actually open something in the web app, first I have to add it to OneDrive. I cannot add it to OneDrive without actually opening OneDrive on the web because it doesn't have a Linux client. Once I ac…

I don't understand why you're complaining the web app requires it to be in OneDrive first: this is no different than Google Docs requiring it to be in your Google Drive first. Apps loading files off your disk is highly problematic, and these apps are ran at least partially server side (both Office365's and Google Doc's). This is a feature, not a bug.

I don't see it as him complaining about the OneDrive requirement per se, but about how that means that since OneDrive doesn't have a Linux client, he's forced to use the web interface, which then forces him to suffer through repeated attempts to try to get him to download OneDrive clients even though platform isn't supported.

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

#79

Post by sandGorgon »

This is wasted effort IMHO. The killer app of Office is Excel and NOTHING has come close to replacing it.

In India, almost all laptop manufacturers give the option of preloaded Ubuntu. Yet people choose to pay for Windows - for either Excel or Photoshop.

I would pay a large sum of money for a compatible spreadsheet. It is well worth doing a startup around.

Everything else - Word or PowerPoint already has reasonable substitutes. Even if it is as simple as a PDF doc.

But there is no substitute for Excel.

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

#80

Post by dorfsmay »

douche wrote: post #75
dorfsmay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they no longer using SIP at all?

I can't imagine that they would dump the SIP protocols that they are using now for Lync/Skype For Business - there's an enormous amount of work invested both by them, and by Plantronics, Avaya, Cisco, and all the other VOIP-phone vendors. As of Skype for Business 2015, it's still SIP - S4B is more of a marketing maneuver than a real technical change. On the server side, applications built to integrate with Lync 2013…

Is Skype using SIP? I thought they were using their own proprietary protocol?
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