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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

#81

Post by huskyr »

sandGorgon wrote: post #79

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 s…

Google Sheets is quite pleasant to use, and sometimes i even prefer it over Excel. For larger data sets, it's lacking though.

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

#82

Post by function_seven »

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.

> The preferred nomenclature is developing countries.

This term has always reeked of over-euphamism to me. I'm not arguing that "third-world" is any better, but what do I call countries that aren't developing? Right now, "developing countries" is used both to refer to countries that are actually developing (Kenya, for example) and as a polite way of saying "poor countries" (e.g. Somalia).

Seems like we should have a term that doesn't confuse the two. When I hear "developing countries", I mentally substitute an image of the most impoverished areas of our world.

Sorry if off-topic...

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

#83

Post by douche »

dorfsmay wrote: post #80
douche wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's the confusion...

Consumer Skype is still, to my knowledge, what it has always been.

However, Lync has been rebranded as Skype for Business. It's still Lync, and uses all of the same SIP-based protocols that it always has, since it was called Office Communicator.

I still haven't quite figured how they are going to mash the two together, or if they actually are going to. It is confusing having two completely different Skype clients on your desktop.

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

#84

Post by coldtea »

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.

>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.).

Or that's what those that built them think.

Then they found out performance and latency make it a non starter, and those "10% of features" that people use from Word, Powerpoint etc, are not the same 10% of everybody, so minimal web based replacements wont cut it.

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

#85

Post by riccardom »

kriro wrote: post #72

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 mor…

If you are interested in document conversion using LO and python you can give it a try to https://github.com/xrmx/pylokit which is a python cffi wrapper for the stable api of LibreOfficeKit.

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

#86

Post by coldtea »

ucaetano wrote: post #67
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not implying the web-based solutions are the only which will exist in the productivity suite market. But they are where the mass market is moving to. Native suites will still exist in niche cases, but they will have a very hard time competing with lightweight, low-overhead web-based suites.

>I'm not implying the web-based solutions are the only which will exist in the productivity suite market. But they are where the mass market is moving to.

Any actual evidence for this in the Office suite space? Because I don't see it happening at all. It was an empty promise of 5-6 years ago, same as "Year of the Linux desktop" never came to be.

For mail and collaboration (Slack, Jira, Asana etc), sure, web solutions will prevail. After all those things are all about the social, collaborative features the web brings to the table.

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

#87

Post by ucaetano »

RottenHuman wrote: post #37
ucaetano wrote: post #2

It's a bit sad to see LibreOffice struggling to maintain relevance when the market it tried to address suddenly became [nearly nonexistent] irrelevant. It reminds me of all those hundreds of early 20th century battleships that suddenly became completely irrelevant when the Dreadnought came by. [Edit: replaced nearly nonexistent with irrelevant to make my point clearer]

> replaced nearly nonexistent with irrelevant to make my point clearer I'm afraid your point is still not clear. What's your metric for declaring a market irrelevant? A conventional office suite is still the solution which is overwhelmingly dominating the market. Maybe look outside your own bubble and bias. A lot of business will never give away there confidential documents in the hands of third party cloud hosts. (w…

When all the major players are switching to a different market. Sure, the installed base is still conventional office suites, but that's like saying that the car market is still gas-based even if all new cars sold are electrical (hypothetical situation).

http://www.winbeta.org/news/office-365-overtakes-google-apps... Bitglass also found that the share of companies using a cloud application for their productivity suite rose from 28% last year to 48% this year. Their report shows that Microsoft has successfully capitalized on the growth in cloud based productivity suite adoption rates to take the lead from Google.

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

#88

Post by enobrev »

sandGorgon wrote: post #79

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 s…

I would pay full price for native adobe tools on ubuntu - especially now with the subscription pricing. My excel needs aren't as big and have mostly been covered by sheets in google docs. But that's personal need; I absolutely agree that excel is a beast. I've seen some amazing things put together by teams of "non-programmers" (in the professional sense) on excel.

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

#89

Post by ygra »

acaloiar wrote: post #65
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…

I suspect that latency can be reduced significantly by limiting tile sizes. They currently use 256x256 tiles, forcing a new tile transfer every time a mutating user action takes place (e.g. a new character typed). A one-size-fits-all tile is unlikely to satisfy users of varying bandwidth and latency tolerance. Of course, further steps can be taken as well, such as adaptive resolution and client-side rendering extrapo…

I get the feeling that if continued in that direction it will be mostly a poor VNC clone.

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

#90

Post by martin-adams »

jo909 wrote: post #71
martin-adams wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A valid point. In this instance, I know because we use Google Apps and store most other things in it. The email is in Gmail, so the difference isn't really that great when you think about it.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to guarantee a 'secure' delivery of documents via email. SMTP might be used rather than SMTPS and you don't always know what servers handle the email when in transit.

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