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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#361

Post by jamwil »

josefx wrote: post #356
jamwil wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct the web version is not a 1:1 swap but the desktop version has been a stable product used by millions for decades. Most users use the desktop version and indeed it has few compatibility issues with itself.

Well the point wasn't "desktop vs. web version" but showing that compatibility issues are common even within the proprietary products of a single vendor, something which one of the previous comments implied wouldn't be the case. If you have to fixate on a single, non portable product (lets not talk about office for Mac) then you can easily get consistency from LibreOffice as well.

In response to the original comment where they said switching to Libre would introduce compatibility problems because the industry standard is Microsoft, I think its an incompatible comparison to talk about minor inconsistencies across the various Microsoft endpoints.

Different file formats. Different software entirely. Compatibility issues would be orders of magnitude more impactful than any issues intrinsic to the O365 suite.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#362

Post by abricot »

coffeeling wrote: post #357
rawgabbit wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple issues. [1] If you drag/drop or upload the file to Teams, it creates a copy and shares it via Teams SharePoint? [2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access". [3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are…

With Teams, the distinction is pretty easy: Within a Team, the file gets uploaded to the Team's SharePoint site. If you share a file in the Chat module, it gets uploaded to your own OneDrive.

It's clear as in "if you know the rule you can count on it" but there is no discoverability within the tool itself. It will even say if a file has been uploaded into the chat already, giving you an impression that the file is in the chat - while it really is in your own onedrive.

I only discovered it by chance while roaming my onedrive directory.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#364

Post by neycoda »

Maybe this will help spurn some necessary and long-overdue problem fixes with LibreOffice, which have gone ignored after being reported seemingly because just not enough people are making a stink about them. I've tried to get Microsoft Office workers to switch but they won't because of these things. If only the LibreOffice devs would take these problems and inadequacies more seriously. Please I hope the German workers report problems and make suggestions and stick to them to improve the product so we have a good free or non-profit office suite to compete with the billionaire companies.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#365

Post by nikodunk »

mschuster91 wrote: post #226
jonesjohnson wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sad story. My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues. The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid... One reason for their switch might be that Microsoft thought about opening up a big office here. Another reason might have been the study conducted by Accenture [1], who have some close ties to Microsoft.…

> It's a sad story. My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues. The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid... I worked on LiMux in the developer team at the start of my career. HN is a village, lol. And the situation is more complex, and long enough has passed for me to detail out what actually were the proble…

Thank you very much for sharing this first-hand knowledge. So interesting!!

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#366

Post by averageRoyalty »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #30

> Why should local governments use taxpayers’ money to buy proprietary, closed software from a single vendor? I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives. Linux is successful on the server because it has huge corporate backing.…

The governments job is to work for and improve society. They should not ever be profit driven or penny pinching.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#367

Post by ffgjgf1 »

rightbyte wrote: post #239
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whol…

Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.

> Vendor lockin

That, but also lack of feature parity. Unfortunately Libre Office is just not very good

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#369

Post by ffgjgf1 »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #273
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess MS could just find a way to guarantee that any data is only stored in data centers in Europe. It shouldn’t be too complicated and I don’t see how could they be considered to be a foreign cloud then.

Can the US government still force them to violate that guarantee? If yes, then they're a foreign cloud.

But then that would apply to every company that has datacenters and provides services both in US and Europe?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#370

Post by ckw460 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #189
Stranger43 wrote: post #7

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enter…

I feel like I've seen this very headline before in Germany specifically several times over the years, like I keep hearing that Germany is using LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Googling to try to confirm this, I see that OpenOffice began when a program called StarOffice was open-sourced, and StarOffice was originally a German product most popular in Germany, so that could be part of German interest in OpenOffice descendents s…

You are spot on. I was just having the same argument with the recent news.... Thinking this is old news
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