Compared and Contrasted: OpenOffice V. LibreOffice

GMGruman writes "Oracle's imposition of fees for some OpenOffice capabilities caused some of the venerable open source office suite's creators to head out on their own and create LibreOffice as a truly free OSS tool. InfoWorld's Neil McAllister reviews the two OSS productivity tools side by side to figure out where they differ, and whether you can jettison Oracle's OpenOffice safely for the fully free LibreOffice."

Comments

Re:Outlook

[BitZtream]

It is if you want to replace Outlook.

My company makes sells a service which can be used from within Outlook via an COM addon. A couple things I can tell you about Outlook users.

They aren't using it for email only. Those people quickly go switch to something that doesn't suck at reading email.

Sales people LIVE in Outlook. Contacts, notes, scheduling, reminders, workflow, document management, CRM and sales process are just the first and obvious things that come to mind. Every one of our customers that uses Outlook in a corporate environment has multiple plugins installed before we even get to them. These plugins make Outlook a client for some other system in their company and typically roll it all into one client reasonable well for the more well established plugins.

To put it bluntly, as much as Outlook sucks for Email, it is in a class all by itself when it comes to being a PIM for someone in a large company.

Nor even remotely necessary.

What you utterly fail to understand is while you think Outlook is an email client, you have absolutely no clue how people actually use it in the real world. You're just spouting off random crap because you think you understand what Outlook is used for, when in reality you don't. Its not a email client, its a PIM with a large feature set that you actually DO need to mimic if you expect people to use something else.

There isn't a Outlook/Exchange replacement, I've been looking for years. If it wasn't needed or people didn't want the features of Outlook, people would use something else in large companies ... but look around, it doesn't happen unless.

I haven't even touched on server side features.

With all that said, I freaking hate Outlook and Exchange, they are big over complicated piles of crap that need to be replaced by an open alternative, but thats not going to happen until the OSS world stops trying to change the way people use software like Outlook into their model and instead tries to make software that fits what those users want. That won't happen until someone can make money off it as its a very big project to take on.