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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

#131

Post by jhwhite »

hunvreus wrote: post #130

I quit using Microsoft Office over a decade ago. The last few years, I relied on LibreOffice but couldn't stand the regular crashes, bugs and overall frustrating user experience. I gave Google Docs another go and I must say I was surprised at how much better it was from 3 or 4 years ago. It was good enough for me to consider using Google Drive; me and my team are now using it for everything and couldn't be happier. W…

Does Google Sheets offer the data analysis tools that Excel does? Or do you have no need for that?

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

#132

Post by jcrawfordor »

douche wrote: post #83
dorfsmay wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dif…

This is a mistake I've seen MS make twice. First, it was OneDrive and OneDrive for Business - they're actually completely different products, and you might remember the outcry around here a while back when it was discovered that OneDrive for Business adds metadata to XML files. A lot of people didn't get what product was really being discussed.

Now it's Skype and Skype for Business. S4B is a steaming heap compared to Skype in terms of features, and I think in the end consumers are going to end up confused and angry about this new Skype that doesn't have the features of the old one.

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

#133

Post by hunvreus »

jhwhite wrote: post #131
hunvreus wrote: post #130

I quit using Microsoft Office over a decade ago. The last few years, I relied on LibreOffice but couldn't stand the regular crashes, bugs and overall frustrating user experience. I gave Google Docs another go and I must say I was surprised at how much better it was from 3 or 4 years ago. It was good enough for me to consider using Google Drive; me and my team are now using it for everything and couldn't be happier. W…

Does Google Sheets offer the data analysis tools that Excel does? Or do you have no need for that?

I know it does formulas and charts. We use it for various things; some accounting, budgets, cash forecasting, marketing metrics...

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

#134

Post by douche »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #132
douche wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dif…

This is a mistake I've seen MS make twice. First, it was OneDrive and OneDrive for Business - they're actually completely different products, and you might remember the outcry around here a while back when it was discovered that OneDrive for Business adds metadata to XML files. A lot of people didn't get what product was really being discussed. Now it's Skype and Skype for Business. S4B is a steaming heap compared to…

Skype for Business is a completely different product than regular Skype. I'm going to bitch until they give some sort of API access to LyncOnline/Office 365, because it makes my day job writing extensions for it more difficult, but as an IM platform and Gotomeeting-esque screensharing tool it's actually quite good. It's not terrible as a softphone, either, if you are making calls between or within federated Lync/Skype environments. Administering and deploying it is kind of a PITA (just look at some of the architecture diagrams[1], or try to set it up as an on-prem/cloud hybrid...), which is why Office 365 is really taking off, but I'd say it compares favorably to IBM's out-to-dry SameTime, or any of the XMPP variants I've encountered.

[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398095.aspx

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

#135

Post by jcrawfordor »

douche wrote: post #134
jcrawfordor wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a mistake I've seen MS make twice. First, it was OneDrive and OneDrive for Business - they're actually completely different products, and you might remember the outcry around here a while back when it was discovered that OneDrive for Business adds metadata to XML files. A lot of people didn't get what product was really being discussed. Now it's Skype and Skype for Business. S4B is a steaming heap compared to…

Skype for Business is a completely different product than regular Skype. I'm going to bitch until they give some sort of API access to LyncOnline/Office 365, because it makes my day job writing extensions for it more difficult, but as an IM platform and Gotomeeting-esque screensharing tool it's actually quite good. It's not terrible as a softphone, either, if you are making calls between or within federated Lync/Skyp…

That's what I'm complaining about, MS keeps taking two different products and giving them the same name. :)

I have major problems with Lync/S4B's IM implementation. The most obvious are the lack of store-and-forward for messages to offline users and the poor to nonexistent support for persistent chat rooms (my solution: a "conference call" that's been going for weeks without anyone having turned on the audio). It's also very bad at handling changes in network connectivity, docking/undocking my laptop drops me from IM for at least a couple of minutes and often requires a restart of S4B.

I will agree that the softphone support is pretty good, but it's non-interoperable with our VoIP environment so it goes almost entirely unused. Unfortunately this has been the case everywhere I've worked except for one place that had WebEx and Cisco phones - those would get along with each-other sometimes if you were lucky, but it wasn't very reliable.

My point is that I've found the office communications landscape to be a terrible backwater of technology. I dislike Slack but I can see why it's taking off - most of the on-prem options for IM fail at basic IM features while adding VoIP/telepresence options that are non-interoperable and complex to implement and support. It says something that my employer has multiple FTEs dedicated to scheduling and setting up the videoteleconference rooms, because it takes a specialist just to make a call these days.

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

#136

Post by douche »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #135
douche wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype for Business is a completely different product than regular Skype. I'm going to bitch until they give some sort of API access to LyncOnline/Office 365, because it makes my day job writing extensions for it more difficult, but as an IM platform and Gotomeeting-esque screensharing tool it's actually quite good. It's not terrible as a softphone, either, if you are making calls between or within federated Lync/Skyp…

That's what I'm complaining about, MS keeps taking two different products and giving them the same name. :) I have major problems with Lync/S4B's IM implementation. The most obvious are the lack of store-and-forward for messages to offline users and the poor to nonexistent support for persistent chat rooms (my solution: a "conference call" that's been going for weeks without anyone having turned on the audio). It's a…

Actually, the product I got hired out of college to work on was a store-and-forward extension for OCS 2007... It was a nasty inherited mess of SIPScript and mostly broken UCMA 2.0... It's possible to do, but not easy.

There are persistent chat rooms available (at least on-premise, if you install the extra server for them - not on Office365, though), but it's a little half-baked.

If we're piling on, there are some other kind of crummy limits, for a large enterprise IM platform. Sending an IM to a large number of recipients is pretty gimped (I believe the limit is in the 100-250 user range), because any chat between three or more users is bumped up into an AV conference. There's limitations on the number both of users who you can subscribe to presence updates, and how many other users can subscribe to your presence.

The client also seems to have some bad memory leaks. Particularly with any kind of extension that makes use of the COM API.

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

#137

Post by sandGorgon »

unixhero wrote: post #118
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…

Although you're not wrong. Excel is the killer app. Word is ALSO the killer app for heavy lifting writing papers etc. It's the program I suffered the least in during my uni years, and I tried them ___ALL___. As an investment analyst for VC, I also need to make A LOT of powerpoint presentations. Not a lot of slides, but I need to convey complex points in a short amount of slides. This makes me push Powerpoint to its l…

Hmm interesting. I have had people switch over to keynote.

What do you think about that?

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

#138

Post by jfim »

SwellJoe wrote: post #119
jfim wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a non starter in many use cases. There's no support for ODBC so you can't connect your spreadsheet to the internal BI servers, conditional formatting is really weak in Google sheets (no data bars, etc.), you can't have spreadsheets that refer to other spreadsheets, docs has awful formatting options, etc. It's just the same thing as comparing nano to emacs/vim. Sure, they both superficially edit text, but that's…

OK, so it's not competitive for some use cases today . Nothing prevents implementation of any of those features, or an evolution away from needing those specific features and replacing them with other features. You mention ODBC, which is a cool feature for some folks, but desktop spreadsheets can't readily hook up to a form on the web, which Google docs can. There are powerful new functionalities provided by web-base…

Nothing prevents implementation of any of those features, other than the fact that browser platforms don't allow some basic features to work.

Copy paste? No, not without Flash. Calendar notifications that work when the browser is closed? Custom fonts? Vertical text? Software that doesn't rot? Accurate page layouts?

If these new functionalities were so good and browser integrations were so powerful, then phones wouldn't need app stores, GMail/Google Docs wouldn't have a mobile application, etc. I'm more than ready to bet that in a decade, there will still be a desktop version of Office.

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

#139

Post by SwellJoe »

jfim wrote: post #138
SwellJoe wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so it's not competitive for some use cases today . Nothing prevents implementation of any of those features, or an evolution away from needing those specific features and replacing them with other features. You mention ODBC, which is a cool feature for some folks, but desktop spreadsheets can't readily hook up to a form on the web, which Google docs can. There are powerful new functionalities provided by web-base…

Nothing prevents implementation of any of those features, other than the fact that browser platforms don't allow some basic features to work. Copy paste? No, not without Flash. Calendar notifications that work when the browser is closed? Custom fonts? Vertical text? Software that doesn't rot? Accurate page layouts? If these new functionalities were so good and browser integrations were so powerful, then phones wouldn…

"Copy paste? No, not without Flash."

What? Of course copy paste works, even with formatting. Or, at least it does on my machine. Spreadsheets are trickier, but there are ways to override the context menu to make it do-able. I assume Google docs can already do it. Haven't tried it specifically, but I don't remember not being able to...so pretty sure I have copied and pasted within a docs spreadsheet.

"Calendar notifications that work when the browser is closed?"

Why would your browser be closed? This is the future we're talking about. Your desktop and everything else will be in your browser. That's like complaining that notifications don't work when your computer is unplugged.

"Custom fonts? Vertical text?"

Already possible and covered by standards. Are you using IE10, or something?

"Software that doesn't rot?"

Hahahah. Funny. How's Visual Basic written ten years ago holding up on Win 10? Sure, it probably runs, but nobody wants to use it. Platforms evolve. Standards compliant HTML and JavaScript written ten years ago is still functional. What do you believe is uniquely prone to "rot" about the web platform?

All of the app stores have hundreds of apps built on web technologies. Google has a mobile version, but does not have a desktop version. In fact, GMail (and moreso, Inbox) are much better evidence for the case I'm making (that the web will devour almost every class of software in a decade) than the case you're making (that office software like Word and Excel are uniquely immune to being devoured). Inbox is a better mail client than Outlook. And Docs will become a better doc suite than Office...or somebody else will build one that is (might even be Microsoft that builds it...if they're smart, it will be).

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

#140

Post by bartvk »

cubancigar11 wrote: post #53
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).

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

But much less reliable, in my experience.
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