LibreOffice Developer Community Increasingly Robust

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

LibreOffice Developer Community Increasingly Robust

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 4, 2012 @10:09AM from the you-could-almost-call-it-jolly dept.

New submitter someWebGeek writes "LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors. The Document Foundation has published new stats that portray the climbing rates of developer involvement both in terms of numbers of people and numbers of code commits. One of the most encouraging aspects, as noted by Ryan Paul in an article at Ars, is that non-corporate code contributions by independent volunteers constitute the largest slice of the latest commit-pie."

42 of 180 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Large Deployments by ninetyninebottles · 2012-02-04 10:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

I really think Libre Office could take off and become a huge OSS success story on the order of Webkit or Apache. It just needs a few extremely large installations by companies or organizations with the funding and will to constantly improve it. Just a few major corporations that currently license MS office, dumping Word and moving to Libre Office while still investing say half or a third of the same budget into targeted improvements for their needs would tip the scales.
I find it about on par with MS Office now, which is to say buggy, erratic, unable to consistently read MS Office formats, and with some really poor UI choices. When used only with the native format, however, it pulls ahead and such a course of action is fairly doable at least within a company, whereas it never seems to be with MS Office (someone is always stuck using a different version, even if it is just a Mac version, and then the documents get messy and weird). Also, I really like the PDF editing. I'm surprised no one else has jumped on that particular gem of functionality.
1. Re:Large Deployments by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-04 10:28 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I believe that LibreOffice will never make it in the corporate world for one single reason: It doesn't include a program that can use MAPI to connect to Exchange. Outlook is very, very ingrained in the corporate world and that alone will prevent any organization using Exchange from switching.
2. Re:Large Deployments by ewanm89 · 2012-02-04 10:30 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Considering Libre Office will run fine without java, okay it's slow to start while it looks for it. But that's about it. It only uses it for openoffice base and a few little usually unnoticed features.
3. Re:Large Deployments by FaxeTheCat · 2012-02-04 10:31 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The problem is that those corporations who have money (I work in such a company) could not be bothered to use resources on development and doing extensive work on specifying improvements or changes. Those corporations who have money want something that works NOW, not something that (maybe) works in 2 - 3 - 4 years.
  And for those companies, the Office license is not a major expense that management will divert attention and resources to save.
  
  Then add that those companies with money also will have the full Microsoft suite like Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync. Not having Office with those would be pretty stupid, as they work best together (yes, you may call it lockin, but I just tell it like it is).
  
  The companies of any size who would want to save money, would do that by using LibreOffice or one of its cousins without paying.
4. Re:Large Deployments by Amouth · 2012-02-04 10:42 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  ^this^
  I would and could move my company to OpenOffice or LibreOffice.. but the lack of a mail server/client on par with Exchange/Outlook that is significantly lower in price to justify licensing it and not just going the MS route is the the largest barrier. If we get rid of MS Office we have to replace Outlook, if we keep Outlook only we might as well just license the whole suite so that we have working integration. If we LibreOffice had a mail client that had good exchange support and was on par with Outlook then we could move to dropping MS Office and only running exchange and buying cal's. While i know there are alternatives to exchange/outlook most of the good ones are not much cheaper to license.
  
  --
  '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
5. Re:Large Deployments by DurendalMac · 2012-02-04 10:51 · Score: 2
  
  The biggest dealbreaker for me is that LibreOffice will friggin' mulch Office files. I've opened up a .docx with it, modified it, and then saved. What I got was a mess. Formatting wrecked, tables gone, figures gone...ugh. Maybe it's fine if you stick to ODF formats, but MS Office interoperability is borderline useless until then get the formatting figured out.
6. Re:Large Deployments by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-04 10:52 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  I don't have Office at home (being both tight and honest) so I use LibreOffice. But it's compatibility with Office is poor. It handles most things well, but not pictures. There are so many "LibreOffice opening an Office document without pictures" bugs that there's recently been an effort to consolidate the bug reports.
  If I needed it for professional work I'd buy Office. Being unable to read documents with pictures is intolerable.
7. Re:Large Deployments by jjoelc · 2012-02-04 11:04 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Wile I don't fit into that large deployment category, I do what I can to promote LibreOffice. We have roughly 100 desktops, and the reality is that well over half of them have no use for MS office in any real capacity. I. deploy LibreOffice to every workstation mainly to make sure everyone has at least that baseline functionality. I store all of my documentation and send out all of my memos etc in an open document format. even if very few people regualrly use LibreOffice to do anything more than read the stuff I send them or open the occasional word document attachment... At least they have been exposed to it, and I have actually had a few people ask me about it when they buy new computers, and see the price of MS Office. It's not much, admittedly, but it works. I'm not pushy about it, I don't evangelize... But they all get some exposure to it, and at least know that there are options when they are personally in the position to make that choice.
8. Re:Large Deployments by slimjim8094 · 2012-02-04 11:18 · Score: 2
  
  While we're dueling anecdotes, I was once able to fix a corrupted Word file for my mother that nobody could open because it confused their parser, and all their products have the same one. OO.o (at the time) was able to open and re-save the file so that it would work correctly, with no loss of formatting.
  
  --
  I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
9. Re:Large Deployments by FaxeTheCat · 2012-02-04 11:21 · Score: 2
  
  The problem is that LibreOffice is stuck as the cheap option.
  The question is how can they get out of that position. The answer is: Money, and somebody with a vision. It seems both are currently lacking, and is there any plans to change it?
  
  And just so there is no misunderstanding: There is nothing wrong with what you do. It is what many people do. Spreading it will put pressure on Microsoft, and judging by the profit of the Office division, they need it...
10. Re:Large Deployments by ninetyninebottles · 2012-02-04 11:22 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The biggest dealbreaker for me is that LibreOffice will friggin' mulch Office files. I've opened up a .docx with it, modified it, and then saved. What I got was a mess.
  I have the same problem with various versions of MS Word. My solution is, sans one client, avoiding the hell out of docx files. They are awful and older versions of Word can't read them either. They are simply a bad idea.
11. Re:Large Deployments by Lumpy · 2012-02-04 11:38 · Score: 2
  
  Why?
  Libre office works fine and if you have an exchange server you get a bajillion free licenses for outlook.
  That is what we do for now. we install Libre office and our free copy of outlook on every PC. 100% legit.
  i know a lot of other businesses doing the same thing. Although we will be ditching the Exchange server soon for Google Mail. It's stupid to run your own Email server anymore with a tiny business that has less than 2000 employees.
  It is far cheaper for us to let google do it for us and eliminate the Exchange server manager position we had. Saves over $40K a year in operation costs in the IT budget, and the guy was a jerk.
  
  --
  Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
12. Re:Large Deployments by gbjbaanb · 2012-02-04 11:43 · Score: 2
  
  there's Zimbra, Horde and similar that provide the same groupware functionality as Exchange, but I think most of that is irrelevant. Most corporates I know use email, calendars and shared contacts as the two parts of Outlook/Exchange. There is a certain amount of archiving that's needed too, but that's trivial to support with other email servers.
  Thunderbird is a great client and has calendar plugins for it, so the client should be no problem.
  If you must migrate from Outlook, but keep exchange, you can use the OWA connector to Thunderbird. This is DavMail and is great - I used to use Thunderbird in a all-MS corporate environment for a while.
  Today, I use Thunderbird (and lightning plugin) with Google calendars and it works fine. I don't have any problems and no lost functionality that was present with Outlook - except for a shared contacts list, but TBH most corporates put all those on a sharepoint site anyway. Go figure, even corporates prefer not to use the basic exchange functionality :)
13. Re:Large Deployments by ArhcAngel · 2012-02-04 11:57 · Score: 2
  
  Saves over $40K a year in operation costs in the IT budget, and the guy was a jerk.
  If you were only paying me $40K a year I'd be a jerk too. I'm not saying his skill set was worth more but I'm sure HE thought it was.
  
  --
  "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
14. Re:Large Deployments by Amouth · 2012-02-04 12:10 · Score: 2
  
  Exchange does not come with Outlook Licenses, they stopped doing that with Exchange 2007 & Outlook 2007.
  
  --
  '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
15. Re:Large Deployments by djl4570 · 2012-02-04 12:11 · Score: 2
  
  I wouldn't use "bad" to describe Outlook, yes it could be better and it is overly complicated for the vast majority of the userbase. It is important to remember that Outlook is more than just an email client. Outlook is firmly anchored in the corporate world by the integrated calendar and automatic reminder notifications. Add integration with Office Communicator and you have tools that provide email, meeting scheduling, instant messaging, voice chat and even desktop sharing. I don't see Libre Office or Open Office doing that anytime soon.
16. Re:Large Deployments by Freultwah · 2012-02-04 12:24 · Score: 2
  
  Older versions of Office can read and write docx, xlsx etc just fine. Head to microsoft.com/downloads and fetch the free Office Compatibility Pack. Done and done. Docx for me has time and again proven more robust than doc, which is why I've started to use it more or less exclusively. I'd use odt, but nobody else does, and I must work with others, so tough luck.
17. Re:Large Deployments by icebike · 2012-02-04 12:26 · Score: 2
  
  Word craps out on long documents, excel has a lot of bugs and powerpoint is SHIT.
  What exactly are you paying for ?
  The sad thing is Word used to be pretty good about not crapping out. I can't figure if it was when they went to XML storage or when the added that god aweful ribbon, but it has gotten progressively worse over the years.
  At work we wrote and edited several very large complex documents in word with no problem, (Office 2000 version). Very big documents. Now it scares me. OOO or LO seem to handle these documents ok, but I've seen a few crashes there as well, but I haven't totally lost anything with either of them yet.
  As for Paying, I stopped upgrading Office/Word a long time ago, and we cut over to OOO, and are now using a mix of OOO and LO.
  Not paying for that stuff anymore.
  
  --
  Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
18. Re:Large Deployments by Koen+Lefever · 2012-02-04 12:41 · Score: 2
  
  Ultimately, it's Microsoft's fault. They invented (and defined) this whole category in the first place, and any imitation of Microsoft Office will end up suffering the same massive feature bloat and quickly become a slug.
  You really believe that Microsoft invented "office software" as a bundle of wordprocessor, spreadsheet & database?
  
  MS Office was introduced in 1990. Forefront's (later bought by Ashton-Tate) Framework was in 1984.
  
  (And to my surprize, it still exists.)
  
  --
  /. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
19. Re:Large Deployments by Dr_Barnowl · 2012-02-04 13:22 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  AFAIK they are doing so ; the main use of Java is for Base, which few people use AFAIK. The secondary use of Java is for some of the file export filters - like the "flat" XML outputs which are good for some XSLT sheets. I think these are getting rewritten in C++.
20. Re:Large Deployments by alexgieg · 2012-02-04 13:23 · Score: 2
  
  the lack of a mail server/client on par with Exchange/Outlook
  Other than opening Outlook once or twice in computers with Office, I haven't ever used it, much less with Exchange, so I don't know what it provides that's different from other e-mail and calendaring programs. I'm familiar with Gmail, Thunderbird, Eudora and a few others, plus the standard feature set of IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but that's about it. Could you provide a short list of the specific features corporations particularly like, specially when it comes to integration with other Microsoft solutions, that isn't available (or as easily available) in alternative solutions?
  Not trolling, just curious.
  (By the way, I use, and like, MS Office 2010, but it's a home installation, not a corporate-integrated one.)
  
  --
  Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
21. Re:Large Deployments by rahvin112 · 2012-02-04 14:54 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Fully integrated email/calendar. The ability to send an appointment while checking others schedules AND scheduling a conference room at the same time. It doesn't help that pretty much every enterprise in the world uses outlook so you can email an outlook appointment outside your organization and have it fully work in not only adding to their calendar at the correct time and provide full details.
  A small list of features:
  - Email with full calendar support.
  - Web-mail with most of the features of the Outlook client.
  - Folders and structures including common folders that can be shared between multiple people.
  - Integrated Contacts with separate personal contacts and company directories.
  - Company directories can store all contact information and in the case of VOIP systems can be linked such that clicking a phone number dials the phone.
  - Integrated Instant messaging and RSS feeds that can be secured and restricted to certain people.
  - Task handling that will track a task list, even between multiple people and offices.
  - Fully shareable calendars and other items allowing people to delegate calendar, email and other tasks to a subordinate.
  - Integration of other items such as the ability to schedule conference rooms and such with a calendar appointment.
  - Distribution lists, Journals, notes and Internet faxing.
  - Push email and calendaring that transfers everything to a PDA/phone automatically with secure handling. Works so well emails often show up on the phone before registering on outlook/exchange.
  Many other features, of course MS is one of the best companies at inter-product ties, such that there is integrated handling of all MS products including the ability to directly cut and paste document items directly into emails and have it fully handled and look and behave perfectly. This extends as well to Share-point which is a network enabled file management system that allows collaboration including multiple people in the same document over the Internet along with check-in and checkout library type handling.
  It's reached the point that if outlook and exchange are down large companies can't even function. I'm not exaggerating either. I've seen personally an exchange crash idle almost the entire company while it's restored. This list was neither comprehensive nor even all the popular features. Just the ones I'm familiar with in my little tiny slice of life. As it's been stated before, most people only use 10% of the programs, but the features that make up that 10% is different for everyone, meaning everything gets used by someone but on average only a small subset is used per individual/company/business.
  To replace MS Office at the enterprise level we have to replace the whole kit and kaboodle. Office, Exhange, Outlook, Sharepoint, etc, precisely because MS has tied them all together so well that they are essentially indispensable to most companies.
22. Re:Large Deployments by davidrfoote · 2012-02-04 15:08 · Score: 2
  
  I think this depends on organizational perspective. Mine was that 1M USD to license Windows and Office every three years is not chump change. So we are moving approximately 600 desktops to Linux and LibreOffice. As we move our workforce increasingly towards web based systems and workflows, desktop tools in the MS Office suite rapidly decrease in value. Similarly the value of windows as the default corporate OS is also rapidly decreasing as we look to cross platform solutions where we can work from next-gen mobile devices and tablets. Saving ~330K USD per year and reinvesting a small portion of that savings into tool improvements and customizations that can be shared with the community sounds like a win-win, and a morale boost for our internal dev teams. Sure we would never make a business decision to replace something that works now, with something that doesn't. But Libre office works well enough now (we tested), and MS office has plenty of its own challenges and limitations. These tools working best together is also subjective. There are better document management systems than share point in the marketplace, and evolving standards such as CMIS for content interoperability between systems that Sharepoint now supports. Microsoft's lock-in strategy has been a double edged sword, as focus on making sure that their systems work better with each other has been counter to ensuring interoperability with other systems in the enterprise. For large enterprises Microsoft systems to not represent the majority.
23. Re:Large Deployments by davidrfoote · 2012-02-04 15:13 · Score: 2
  
  We struggled with the same issue, and decided to replace Outlook desktop with Outlook web for the 600 desktops that we are migrating to Linux and LibreOffice. OWA in exchange 2010 is robust enough to address the majority of our enterprise needs. We also found that cross-platofrm compatibility with OWA is much better than desktop clients and prefer OWA on Mac, Windows, and Linux, to a mixed back of clients on each OS. You're right that MS prevents licensing portions of the office suite separately, as we had considered keeping outlook desktop clients, this is annoying to say the least, and played a big factor in our deciding to boot MS Office and windows from many of our desktops altogether.
24. Re:Large Deployments by Amouth · 2012-02-04 15:41 · Score: 2
  
  OWA 2010 is light years head in the right direction compared to previous OWA's.. but i think it still has a bit to go for general ease of use (not MS's fault but the tech just isn't quite there to completely blur the line between desktop and web apps). If MS continues in the same direction and at the same pace they have from 00-03-07-10, then what you have done will be an option on our side as i would expect the newest version of OWA to support some of the up coming offline web app and local data storage support. one of the main reasons we can'd do what you have done is 90% of our users travel and are constantly in and out of their mail and items while in air ports and on planes or at a client site where they have zero access to a network/net connection 90% of the time..
  
  --
  '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
25. Re:Large Deployments by hairyfeet · 2012-02-04 15:55 · Score: 2
  
  Well that was one area where MSFT was smart, the whole "developers developers developers" bit. They've always been quite good with giving you plenty of docs and a large KB to work with so using their tools is pretty painless. Now you can even download Visual Studio Express for free, so it doesn't cost anything to use VS for some small project. I agree with you though that the sooner Java is history the better, I don't install anything but writer with my new builds now simply because i don't want LO asking for Java, once its completely out of there I'll start installing the full suite again.
  
  --
  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
26. Re:Large Deployments by CAIMLAS · 2012-02-04 16:17 · Score: 2
  
  Here's the problem: Exchange isn't just a mail server, it's also:
  * An address/contact book server for:
  - personal addresses/contacts
  - shared/group addresses/contacts
  - organization/server-wide contacts
  * A calendar server
  - personal
  - shared from internal exchange users
  - shared from server/organization-external exchange users
  - local/server wide shared
  * connected to the same authentication backend your workstations use (Active Directory) and configurable through such
  * single authentication/configuration point for all of those things
  So, what we need then is:
  * an open MAPI server implementation/gateway
  * something to control said configuration/backend through AD (or some other directory which we can also auth our workstations through) - Samba would be the natural choice for this; unfortunately, Samba 4 has been in process since at least 2005, and is still yet not even usable at a 2000-level AD controller without significant problems. :(
  
  --
  ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
27. Re:Large Deployments by SpzToid · 2012-02-04 16:50 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Microsoft Outlook is a massive organisational security risk that is also used as an email client.
  
  --
  You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
28. Re:Large Deployments by Bert64 · 2012-02-04 21:11 · Score: 2
  
  Forget MAPI, use IMAP for mail and CalDAV for calendaring...
  There are plenty of packages which suit your requirements, Zimbra and Zarafa for starters but there are more.
  
  --
  http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Activity-based metrics tell us little by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-04 10:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

I was never a big fan of activity-based metrics. Do they really tell you anything? Do you really care how many people it took to build your car? Or do you care how well it works? Would making a car with twice as many people make it better? Or worse?
Ditto with software. Don't tell me how much you spent, in subsidized and volunteer programmers. Tell me what you accomplished. Large numbers don't guarantee anything. And small numbers don't necessarily hurt you. Look back at earlier generations of office applications, where Quattro Pro was originally written by four programmers, and Emacs by one.
Telling us how many people it took to make a particular version of LibreOffice actually tells us nothing.
1. Re:Activity-based metrics tell us little by styrotech · 2012-02-04 13:10 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Telling us how many people it took to make a particular version of LibreOffice actually tells us nothing.
  Sure it does. It tells us that more developers are now able or willing to work on LibreOffice and that the fork is working.
  It tells us that the development community is growing and and momentum is building after stagnating under the watch of Sun and Oracle.
  Surely a growing active community is better than a shrinking and stagnating one?
Re:I wish I could use it by bogaboga · 2012-02-04 11:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

In my case, I also wish I could use it. But the problem is its lack of a [credible] MS-Access like database. The one found bundled with it sucks big time! It's a non-starter for me.
I could pitch this suite to those who could find its other attributes compelling, but the fact that it's just too ugly (by default), kills the 'appetite' for those who would probably give it a chance.
Stopped using office suites entirely by Arancaytar · 2012-02-04 11:15 · Score: 3, Interesting

Unfortunately LibreOffice hasn't yet managed to fix the horrible memory footprint OO.o had, so I've switched to writing all text documents in TeX (using Lyx) and using Gnumeric for spreadsheets. But for opening files others send me, this is easily the best. It'll even make an excellent effort at rendering shitty formats like .doc.
While everyone else is bitching... by elashish14 · 2012-02-04 11:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

I for one, am excited to see what changes are coming in the future. TDF has been in existence for only about a year and a half now. Here's a list of things it's not gonna achive in that short of a time:
1. It will not magically implement all the functionality that's been in MSOffice for over a decade.
2. It will not integrate with LO $REQUISITE_MS_PROTOCOL (and it's not like it's even possible because they're all proprietary anyways)
3. It will not instantly purge LO of all Java dependencies for which replacements are in development
4. It will not be able to make it run in under 10MB
5. It will not have a brand new shiny interface which can resurrect a living unicorn.
So seriously, quit bitching. Having a large, active community is a good thing and should hopefully signal that there's a lot of good stuff to look forward in the future. No, it's not gonna be here today or tomorrow. Like I tell my kids: learn to be patient. Please.

--
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
1. Re:While everyone else is bitching... by Arancaytar · 2012-02-04 13:24 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  5. It will not have a brand new shiny interface which can resurrect a living unicorn.
  ... why would a living unicorn need resurrecting?
  Sorry, I overthink these metaphor thingies.
Re:I wish I could use it by Osgeld · 2012-02-04 12:10 · Score: 2

depends, for SOHO's access works fine, tons of normal people know how to use it and it there included with your office package.You tell someone like my dad who just keeps customer data in an access db that so and so showed him how to do however many years ago that "SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine." and watch the fun begin
Never going to happen and shouldn't by dbIII · 2012-02-04 15:22 · Score: 2, Interesting

Why do people think MS Exchange is so good? Don't they know anything about it at all?
Also don't give me the "no other single program" bullshit - MS Exchange is a suite and a not entirely well integrated one at that. Take a look at any mailing list where MS Exchange admins post their cries for help on weird mail munching bugs and you'll get an idea that it's still not yet as good as advertised a decade ago.
As to why it's never going to happen, you are asking to hit an obscured hidden target in a moving pile of spaghetti. A "feature" of MS Exchange is MS Office integration and MS Office integration only, and every time something else works with it a "fix" comes out to stop it.
As for thinking MS Outlook is good, do you actually believe that? I'm a *nix admin but I've wasted vast amounts of time helping out when the MS Windows people didn't have enough manpower to solve problems with corrupted mailboxes, virus infection and all the trouble that comes from using the throwaway free gift with MS Office which is Outlook.
1. Re:Never going to happen and shouldn't by Amouth · 2012-02-04 16:01 · Score: 2
  
  from your post i could make some assumptions to the environment that you have seen it used.. but i don't like taking stabs into the wind.. but i will say we do not have issues like you have described and what i see other people having. mainly because we do not even attempted to use a single tool for all jobs.
  Exchange's lights shine as a work group server. while yes Exchange can handle all the functions of a general MTA it isn't good at it.. Sendmail is much much better, same with filtering spam and viruses out of incoming and out going messages.. we use Sendmail SA CAV to proxy/buffer/clean all incoming mail and also to handle external delivery of messages. our exchange infrastructure does not see the outside world except for mobile devices and OWA. we get all of the benefits of exchanges work group functions and integration without most of the headaches you read about.
  in fact the only problem we have had in recent memory has to do with incoming message X- headers:
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/04/06/3407221.aspx
  lucky we where not adversely effected by it - but we did add it to our considerations for the next upgrade/roll-out
  
  --
  '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
2. Re:Never going to happen and shouldn't by dbIII · 2012-02-04 18:12 · Score: 2
  
  from your post i could make some assumptions to the environment that you have seen it used
  You'd be wrong anyway because it's several different environments spread over more than a decade and having to clean up other people's messes.
  I agree with the way you have it - put it under adult supervision of something else to do the hard work and make it trivial to do backups of the mail that passes through it. The first time I did a full test backup and then bare metal restore of MS Exchange I just could not understand why anybody thought it was ready for release.
  I think that once you have it there's no choice other than to keep it running as well as possible because it has it's obfiscated hooks in so deep into everything that there is no way to replace it a single compenent at a time.
  Back to my main point - third party tools working with it have a very limited lifetime due to unexpected and often undocumented changes, so don't expect LibreOffice to work with it for very long if it ever works with it at all. Many of the MS Exchange problems I've seen resulted from the third party antivirus, fax etc not being entirely compatible with a new version or a patch. Of course there were others where nobody else was involved apart from Microsoft, like the OPEN RELAY BY DEFAULT behaviour after one patch that should have cost a few people at MS their jobs (but didn't because all the guys with a clue had left MS Exchange and they had to put up with the guys with half a clue).
  Is for MS Outlook - I've had to set people up with VPNs purely to get mail due to it not being able to get it reliably via SSL itself.
I Agree - Zimbra Does This TODAY by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-04 19:57 · Score: 5, Interesting

I Agree and Zimbra Does This TODAY.
Here's a comparison between Zimbra from a few yrs ago to MS-Exchange:
http://www.slideshare.net/agileware/zimbra-collaboration-suite-vs-microsoft-exchange-2008
We deployed Zimbra a few years ago because we needed enterprise calendaring. You know - seeing other people's calendars and setting up shared calendars for a group. We aren't a Microsoft-shop.
Zimbra made all that easy.
For a long time, using the calendar meant having to use the zimbra web-client or a java-based thick-client. That changed about a year ago when Thunderbird+Lightning finally started working with calendars properly.
Since June-ish, I haven't used the Zimbra web-client at all.
When MS-Office switched to the Ribbon, people my age with 15 yrs using the old menus were thrown for a loop. At that point, I dumped MS-Office and haven't looked back. The only Office-like tool I still use is Visio. There isn't any substitute for that and I don't see one on the way either.
Because I work in a smaller company now, we've switched to web-apps for every corporate app that we could. This means we don't mandate any specific desktop and encourage departments to use what works for them and their budgets. More and more are deploying Linux-based desktops AND solving real problems with it. I doubt it will ever completely replace Ms-Windows here. Some things just aren't possible with Linux, but we provide terminal servers for those groups. Business productivity software works great over the LAN using RDP - when and if it is necessary. Not having to deal with AV and viruses on the desktops constantly has this CIO happier. When a virus does hit here, it is on a server or a printer, not most desktops.
I know this method can't work for everyone inside every company. Heck, we can't do it for ours 100% either.
Zimbra has freed us from the MS-Koolaid. If you run Exchange, you must run AD ... DHCP, DNS and buy CALs from MS. Then MS-SQL becomes required and all the MS-Windows Server licenses ... sure, all these things are integrated but they are a bear to upgrade - at least MS-Exchange is. Exchange is the linchpin - Zimbra removes it.
Younger users - those in their 20s are used to integrated webmail+webcal+webIM+webdocs. It isn't a big leap for them to use Zimbra.
As a replacement for Sharepoint, we use Alfresco. It isn't perfect, but the price is right. Did you know that whitehouse.gov uses a Drupal front-end connected to an Alfesco back-end?
Costs for acquisition and support for both Zimbra and Alfresco are much less than the Microsoft options overall while providing competitive features. It is definitely worth a look.
KOfffice by unixisc · 2012-02-04 20:40 · Score: 2

While my Linux box was still working, I used KOffice a bit, and it was minimally okay. Didn't try doing much of the stuff I was used to doing in MS Office under Windows. However, in KSpread, some of the Excel nicities, like autofill, where by highlighting 2 successive cells filled w/ 1 and 2 and then dragging it, one could get a whole list of numbers, seemed to be missing.
All this I did w/ the KOffice that came w/ KDE 3.5 (I'm not talking Trinity here). So my question is - has anyone tried KOffice lately, and how is it? Has it borrowed features from LibreOffice or even Office that would let it be more functional? Whenever I do get back to using it (once I get PC-BSD), I'd like to work using it, but I'd like to know what other users' experiences have been like.
Re:Calligra (was: KOfffice) by ingwa · 2012-02-06 04:14 · Score: 2

No, this is not correct although I understand why you might get that impression.
Here is the short story on the Calligra Suite:
Calligra was indeed spun off from KOffice about a year ago. Some call it a fork but it was actually more of a split. Some applications moved to Calligra (KPlatoPlan, Kexi, Brainstorm, KPresenterStage), some others were indeed forked ( KWordWords). Many of them got new names as did the whole suite (which you can see in the previous sentence).
KOffice was a nice enough office suite for users with simple needs, but the Calligra team has bigger plans. One of the big strengths oof Calligra is that it's both very modular and the UI is well separated from what we call the Office Engine which handles loading, storing, saving, and rendering of documents but not editing. This is the result of the work from the last 2 years, much of it sponsored by Nokia. During the same time the engine itself has also been much improved with a completely new text layout engine, automatic tests to ensure that we don't get any regressions, many new features and improved stability. There is a company called KO GmbH that does commercial work on Calligra, and they have had most of their business around the engine and the import filters for Microsoft formats.
So during this last year much much energy has been put into the office engine which benefits all platforms / UI's and a number of new UI's have been developed: Nokia Harmattan Office for the N9, Calligra Mobile for the nokia n900 (this one is actually a bit older), Calligra Active for the Plasma Active environment which just got announced will be used in the Spark tablet.
What has indeed been lagging behind was the desktop UI which would give you the impression that you got. But the last few months we have also seen a lot of work here. The style manager has been improved, the text formatting dialogs (actually dockers in the case of Calligra desktop) are much nicer now and new features like footnotes/endnotes and many others have been developed and integrated. Note that these features were already present in the engine so it was a relatively minor effort to implement them in the UI. Also other applications than the word processor have gotten a number of new features but Calligra is so modular that it's sometimes difficult to say which application benefits the most from a new feature. If it's available in one application it's also available in the others provided that the feature makes sense in them.
Now we are getting closer to the first release. We hope it will be at the beginning of March, and we have great hopes that people will like what we have done.