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SUSE's LibreOffice Core Team Moves To Collabora
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Meeks has announced that the core of SUSE's LibreOffice team is moving over to Collabora, which will now be providing commercial LibreOffice support. 'It seems to me that the ability to say "no" to profitable but peripheral business in order to strategically focus the company is a really important management task. In the final analysis I'm convinced that this is the right business decision for SUSE. It will allow Collabora's Productivity division to focus exclusively on driving LibreOffice into Windows, Mac and Consulting markets that are peripheral to SUSE. It will also retain the core of the existing skill base for the benefit of SUSE's customers, and the wider LibreOffice community, of which openSUSE is an important part.'"
I figured a libre-office hater would be the first post. Just to counter it, here's my Open/Libre Office experience. In 2000, I started a software company in NC, and bought every employee (we were all big geek programmers) Linux laptops. I didn't pay for a single Windows Office license (though we paid for a bunch of Visual C++ pro seats). It's been 13 years, and even though I have been in a CTO role all that time, I've not once had to install Windows Office. I see co-workers, mostly in biz-dev, marketing, sales, or management roles who get squished by people who send them documents in a more recent Office format. Management hates paying for new software simply to load new file formats. LibreOffice has loaded and edited every file I ever had to deal with since 2000, for free, while my Office addicted co-workers have put out a lot of $$ just to keep up. You're upset about bugs in file recovery?!? Get a real job!
Now I have to give Microsoft some kudos. They've actually managed to continue to innovate in this space, and the PowerPoint presentations I see from co-workers who are PowerPoint fan-boys beat anything I've seen from the LibreOffice geeks. From a visual presentation point of view, they win. That's worth some $.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
"Open office .. it'll overwrite you're auto backups"
From what I've experienced OO prompts the user and asks if they want to recover any lost documents.
I'm a bit skeptical of ms office's greatness too. My company and I do support and having been the one to get the company off the ground I did a lot of it until a few years ago. My recollection is people fear stuff that is different, but in reality MS Office requires significantly more maintenance. There are lots of bugs in it. For instance I had a employee (way overqualified and extremely knowledgeable all around) spend 3-4 days on one customs outlet because of a bug. The most recent MS Outlook was doing something much worse than the auto-recovery bug this person speaks of. Had my tech not done the smart thing and backed everything outlook related up before he upgraded the customer would have been screwed. If you wonder why it took so long too- it's a business customer who lives off email.
Now I had another similar customer a few years back. Same thing happened. The difference is I didn't waste 3-4 days. I hack'd it and the hack involved gmail. Turned out gmail does everything most people really need and was a much better solution than Outlook. It was pretty hilarious. There is this fear that only Outlook / microsoft Office can do what you need it to. It's just not the case though.
And personally I've only ever run this business (substantial size now; 5 years and many employees) off GNU/Linux, Thunderbird/Evolution, and LibreOffice. Ohh we do have imap setup and webmail. Nothing is even outsourced (well, I do use gmail for contacts/calendar actually although we are going to eliminate that shortly).
While we started off doing support for mostly MS Windows users about 90% of our business is now GNU/Linux and it in part due to people purchasing our solutions. The other part is an increase in customers simply going GNU/Linux on there own initiative. About 50% of non-technical local customers who were on MS Windows when they started with us have gone GNU/Linux. It could be 80% if we had a solution for quickbooks.
Both the mail and the calendaring part has been figured out a long time ago. It's called CalDAV and IMAP. Get with the times, Exchange/Outlook is only king where the subjects want it to be. There are drop-in replacements for Exchange Server, it's just a question of figuring out how to do it and get your stuff out of the proprietary cycle. Microsoft has itself abandoned Office and Exchange in favor of it's cloud (pay-per-view) offering, there is nowhere to go but open.
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Okay. Having gotten this far in the page, I've seen more comments bitching about the stereotypical slashdotter bashing microsoft than actual commenters bashing microsoft. And this is not a new trend. Now, I may not be the sharpest shed in the tool, but seems to me that 'truth' is highly subjective here.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Have you considered getting a real life?
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
"Libre Writer .. can't even do a search and replace on a manual page feed"
...
Install the AltSearch extension and search for \p
There are drop-in replacements for Exchange Server, it's just a question of figuring out how to do it...
"DROP IN" means there's a readily available "Downloads" page at some website, where you go to download some 250MB executable file with a free 2-user licence, and once you download that file, you double click on it, and it brings up a choice panel between "Basic" and "Advanced" installation, and 99% of all n00b users can choose the "Basic" installation, and within 5 minutes or so, you're up and playing around with the system and getting a feel for how it works and how your users could benefit from switching to the system.
"Drop-In" does NOT mean that you have to spend a week at Amazon, reading through thousands of product reviews, deciding which stack of softcover programming books with pictures of bizarre esoteric mammals on their covers you will need to purchase, and then spending about three or four years of your life actually reading the stack of softcover programming books with pictures of bizarre esoteric mammals on their covers, until you have a PhD-level understanding of C-Compilers [and a worthwhile opinion as to whether you should compile with the GNU compiler or Clang/LLVM or the Intel compiler or the M$FT compiler or the WTFE compiler], and which libraries you will need to compile against, and the theory of BASH shells, and the theory of prime numbers & elliptic curves and LDAP authentication, and the theory of sector-level hard-drive replication living beneath WebDAV and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And then five or ten years later, when you've finally earned your "PhD" from the "School of Hard Knocks", you've still got to spend six or eight weeks at various internet forums, from Palo Alto to Bangalore, trying to figure out WTF line of code you need to add to some configuration file to get it all to work together reasonably "seamlessly", when finally some poor fat bearded dude, working for free from his mother's basement in Bulgaria, finally points out to you that your corporation can't do this because your 1,000 client computers have a known "issue" involving their 3Com ethernet chipsets in combination with their ATi graphics chipsets, but that no one has been able to chase down where that particular bug might live in the total code package, and so you're SOL.
At which point you learn that no one ever got fired for purchasing M$FT.
Bullshit. You can clearly see pattens when it comes to pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft/Windows posts being moderated highly, and anti-Linux and pro-Microsoft/Windows posts being moderated poorly, regardless of the merit of what's being discussed and even the validity of their arguments.
People HATE Microsoft here, often with good reason. But they're also often unable to accept that Linux might have its own set of flaws and that it could not be anything but perfect. I've seen it time and time again - and I've argued with them time and time again (in older, now dormant accounts because it got too much). Nothing's changed in 10 years.
You were modded troll because "To be honest I have enough trouble leaving Microsoft products at times, although often it's because they are the best at what they do" is incorrect. Nobody would replace the OS that came on their computer unless the replacement was superior, and Linux IS superior. My W7 notebook will be joining the tower in running kubuntu very soon -- Windows gets slower and slower all the time as its registry becomes hugely bloated. It seems uninstalling a program seldom deletes any registry keys; I'm using the Windows AV (can't remember its name) and have uninstalled AVG, yet Windows keeps nagging my to turn AVG on.
Windows lacks features, has to be rebooted monthly, its useability is awful, and it's slow as molasses compared to Linux.
As to "Explorer file manager has no equivalent in terms of speed, functionality and usability compared to anything in Linux", that is PURE troll. Windows file manager was all right in XP but the one in W7 is klunky as hell. I don't remember the name of kubuntu's file manager, but it's heads and shoulders above Windows'.
As to MS Office I'll agree Excel is the best spreadsheet, but Word has few advantages over Oo, and MS Access is one of the reasons I'm glad I retire next year. I miss real DBMS languages like NOMAD and it's little brother dBase. I'm still pissed about what MS did to FoxPro after buying it. It was a great little DBMS before Microsoft bought and ruined it.
And Outlook is the absolute WORST email client I've ever had the misfortune of using. They went all MS a couple of years ago where I work and I miss the Novell email client.
I use MS products at work and absolutely HATE them. Microsoft makes the absolute WORST products of anyone's in my opinion.
You were modded troll because it was a troll. I completely agree with the guy who modded you down.
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