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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

#91

Post by paublyrne »

function_seven wrote: post #82
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…

You can use LDC if you prefer (Lesser Developed Countries.).'The Global South' is often used in economics circles. There's no term that is wholly satisfactory.

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

#92

Post by rwmj »

My company did this back in 2000 using StarOffice which was the precursor to LibreOffice (via OpenOffice). Some screenshots[1]. What's interesting is that the numbers don't add up - it's hard to make a profit even at high subscription rates when you have to pay for all the hardware involved. Anyway, I hope they know what they're doing.

[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content

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

#93

Post by spdionis »

rplnt wrote: post #62
spdionis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I though Europe had much better access to fast and cheap Internet compared to USA? Lowest offering from my ISP is 100/10 for around $16. No problems with HD video. Especially not with Youtube's interpretation of HD.

I don't know about USA but most "third world" eastern europe countries have some of the best internet infrastructures in the world with peanut prices.

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

#94

Post by SwellJoe »

coldtea wrote: post #84
ucaetano wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

I haven't used a desktop document or spreadsheet in years. The argument that a couple of missing features, or ones that are somewhat sluggish over a bad network connection, will prevent widespread adoption of cloud-based products is completely ignoring the huge benefits of cloud-based systems.

In short: Calling Google docs a "non-starter" seems like a difficult position to defend. It's already in use by millions of people, daily, and growth is high. There are plenty of folks, including businesses, who have opted not to install MS Office and instead use Docs for everything. Sure, there are plenty of situations where that doesn't work, but as the "web as a platform" advances, and as office products on the web advance, the reasons for sticking with installed apps will continue to decline.

There will continue to be need for installed applications for heavy users for a long time to come (nobody is suggesting serious video or audio editing online, yet, but image editing is already reasonably do-able). Text-based and number-based documents? Those are easy. The very first personal computers could do them pretty well (Visicalc and WordStar, among others), and the web as a platform is vastly more powerful than the Apple II, C64, or IBM PC, that ran those products. And, they're also very easy to work on over very slow connections; you download the whole doc and check in changes in the background. Effectively making all the work happen on the client-side. No big deal.

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

#95

Post by e12e »

martin-adams wrote: post #90
jo909 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The email is in Gmail

> As far as I can tell, there is no way to guarantee a 'secure' delivery of documents via email.

Well, if neither of you forwards to an external account, gmail->gmail email should be pretty "secure" (against other adversaries than Google, those that have hacked one of your Google accounts, and those that Google cooperate with (if any)).

It's not clear by what you write if someone@example.com is emailing you@gmail.com (And so should know that Google knows all the things), or if you meant that you both use Gmail - or if you use Google Apps, so you already give all your emails to Google, but not in a way that is transparent to the sender (however, if the sender doesn't use any kind of end-to-end encryption...).

Not meant as a nitpick -- just pointing out that for some values of "secure" using a single provider for email can be "more secure".

I suppose the "enterprise" alternative would be to have accounts in cross-trusted AD with client-certificates and use S/MIME for client-client end-to-end encryption. In which case (AFAIK) by default, there'd be the possibility of keeping an escrow key.

(The open alternative would probably be to just use Gnu Privacy Guard)

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

#96

Post by JoshTriplett »

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…

Microsoft's OOXML is a joke, no matter who rubber-stamped it. It's effectively the binary Office formats expressed via XML. Any office suite adding support for it still has to include the myriad piles of compatibility hacks they did for binary Office documents. OOXML contains several "transitional purposes only" formats that were obsolete before they ever went through the joke of a "standardization process", rather than standardizing a single format; as a result, anything wanting to read real-world documents in the format has to handle all of those "transitional" formats. And OOXML contains elements like "lineWrapLikeWord6" and "useWord2002TableStyleRules".

OOXML was designed, effectively, to be the easiest possible transition from the binary Office formats rather than being the best possible document standard, or even a good document standard. Direct quote from the proponents of the standard: "OpenXML was designed from the start to be capable of faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by Microsoft Corporation."

That doesn't make it a bad representation format for a vendor's proprietary office suite, but it does make it a bad standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... is worth reading; the "standardization" process itself was effectively politics, not technology.

By contrast, there are multiple independent implementations of ODF.

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

#97

Post by bkor »

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.

What's your experience based upon?

Sales and marketing are often heavy Excel users from what I've seen. Even with the uptake of Salesforce (seems to be used more and more), you still have lots of Excel users. HR is usually a tiny bit of the company so I don't really find that interesting.

I mostly see a mix of things at best.

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

#98

Post by the_why_of_y »

pidg wrote: post #16
DiabloD3 wrote: post #12

To those claiming that Office 365 somehow promotes web apps as your real apps... that isn't entirely true. My company (the one I started, hi) uses Office 365, and all three of us use Office 365's full office suite, the actual real desktop app one. What we use Office 365's cloud stuff for is their Exchange cluster (oh God, so delicious), and for OneDrive for Business (ie, what used to be Sharepoint). Browsers just are…

+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…

> Collabora - and their proprietary fork of LibreOffice

It looks like this Web based LibreOffice is all available from public git repos[1], so why are you calling it a proprietary fork?

[1] https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

SwellJoe wrote: post #94
coldtea wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 no…

I haven't used a desktop document or spreadsheet in years. The argument that a couple of missing features, or ones that are somewhat sluggish over a bad network connection, will prevent widespread adoption of cloud-based products is completely ignoring the huge benefits of cloud-based systems. In short: Calling Google docs a "non-starter" seems like a difficult position to defend. It's already in use by millions of p…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by _wmd »

ygra wrote: post #89
acaloiar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I regularly use Microsoft Remote Desktop in full color mode over 3G from the UK against a machine hosted outside Paris, as an example of what's possible given enough effort, RDP is a bastion of pure awesomeness. I have on many occasions failed to notice I'm running gvim on the remote box compared to a local VM on my laptop. In full screen mode they're practically indiscernible if you aren't paying attention to the latency of your keystrokes. It's impressive enough that on a high bandwidth low latency connection, even small YouTube videos play well.

RDP is heavily integrated into the OS, I'm not sure where it derives its advantage, but for example, dragging a window across the desktop (requiring massive region dirtying) is somehow almost flawless. For example it might be quite an easy affair to delegate compositing and blending to the client, such that the client has a full copy of the bitmaps being dragged around the screen. VNC is intentionally stupid by design and nothing like that (it hails from an era when a microcontroller was preferable for cost reasons compared to a computer in some hypothetical X terminal design - remember VNC is from the 90s).

There is a ton of stuff Libreoffice can do this in this department to produce a compelling solution, alpha quality "release early release often" editions shouldn't be used to form a long term judgement, especially when examples of better implementations already exist, and there is real money on the table to motivate further innovation.

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