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Why Munich Will Stick With Linux
Jason Hibbets writes: "There are many solved problems in open source. Groupware is not one of them," Georg Greve, co-founder and CEO of Kolab System starts off his post highlighting recent features of the latest release of the Kolab groupware project. He calls out a few newly elected politicians that don't like the current set-up, but says that thousands of users don't have the same experience. "Until today, the city of Munich is using the same stand-alone calendaring and email systems it had used when it was still fully operating on Windows. Updating these systems had a lower priority than the migration to LiMux then. But an upgrade is underway now. And, the solution they chose is agnostic to the desktop platform and will service LiMux and Windows alike. The primary difference made by another migration would likely be due to the perils that come with any migration, such as additional costs and delays. In other words: The very problem used to criticize the LiMux desktop is already being solved."
It all reads like an ad for Kolab.
This space for rent.
They should teach these people how to install linux on their home computers too. It's less confusing to have one os (all linux) than two (linux in the office, windows at home). Maybe even give them a free linux laptop for the home. They can afford that because of the license fee savings for not using windows.
no, I don't have a sig
> You can't easily exchange documents with GNU/Linux and expect it to work.
Sure you can. Or at least you can as much as you can expect this to work with random versions of office itself. This problem is so pervasive that you won't even get blamed for running a deviant word processor if there are problems.
msoffice based document interchange is so problematic that some people/industries just gave up and defected to PDF.
Like anything else, you have to focus on actual real world requirements and use cases and not the most obscure corner case that you can concoct. The same goes for "groupware". I am not convinced that this is a big problem.
Again... what people actually use versus someone's chosen bullet points.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's amazing! IT issues getting fixed... I thought programmers just liked to make things worse. Who da thunk it?
Yes but you usually don't run into this problem when using MSOffice because everyone in the office has the same Office. Of course this is not a problem after the migration as long as you migrate everyone to the new format.
One of the many reasons these kinds of migrations fail is because they don't think about these kind of details, using windows everyone just saved their documents in the default format of whatever office version they are using. When migrating some people will save their docs as .odt, some as .doc and some will still be using windows for a while and saving as .docx.
You have not had to deal with documents created with anything after Word 97 have you? And don't get me started on PowerPoint...
Yes but you usually don't run into this problem when using MSOffice because everyone in the office has the same Office....
Not all offices have the same version of MS Office installed throughout the office. I've been at companies that have had three different versions of MS Office installed, and they did have issues with exchanging documents. The easiest solution was just to tell everyone to "save as an old MS Office format" when a document needed to be shared.
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Moving form office to office, I've found that LibreOffice does better than MS Office at properly importing office documents from various versions of MS Office. YMMV.
"Yes but you usually don't run into this problem when using MSOffice because everyone in the office has the same Office. "
No, no they dont.
There is actually one problem with opensource and that is that your organization will be attacked by proprietary companies that are freaking out. But this problem can be turned into an asset. The idea is to identify the ways that the proprietary companies manage to insinuate themselves and eliminate those paths. So if an organization suddenly finds a few of their IT people cheerleading some company like Microsoft, then there should be a thorough investigation as to how they have been turned, was it "free" training? Was it some new head of IT who needs to be removed?
Then these tactics need to be published so that other organizations can watch for these fifth column attempts and whatnot.
Often with these situations the company will have salesmen who have commissions well in excess of 1%. So if they can lie, cheat, bribe, or blackmail their way into a organization-wide sale then they could be looking at commissions well into the millions.
And this is where Open Source generally has a huge weakness; no sleazy salesmen. But that is also where it is very attractive. Most heads of organizations hate how much time they have to waste fending off sleazy salesmen doing underhanded attempts to end run them. Either through the ground floor (converting some IT people) or going over their heads through a board of directors. And never mind those situations where one company will insist that in order to do business with them that they are a "Microsoft Shop" only. So they will do something like insist on work orders be placed through an outlook only system or some stupid sharepoint crap.
If I were in charge of something like the city of Munich I would put out a memo that says, "If you talk to a large software vendor then your continued employment is unlikely."
Now go and visit the company lawyer's office. They have to deal with messed up documents comming in from all kinds of crusty word processors. The same thing also happens to the engineers who run multi-national projects and deal with various subcontractors.
Whereas I appreciate the beauty of OpenSource, I am yet to find a compelling MS Access equivalent in the Linux world. Yes, I know about Kexi, MariaDB, OpenOffice Base and the like.
But let's face it: There's nothing in the Linux world that can compare to MS Access. Nothing! I am not just trolling. I have developed hundreds small scale MS Access implementations for many clients.
VB, even with its quirks, does well. I would like a front-end, in which business logic can be programmed. Logic placed right there on the form...Logic and parameters that can be passed to the DB engine. Nothing friendly exists in Lunix, or should I say, "I haven't found one yet." Am I wrong?
My experience is that when new versions of Word have problems opening a file created by a previous version, the solution is to open them in OpenOffice and use OO to save to the newest MS Word format (or leave them as odt).
In that way, OpenOffice has BETTER compatibility with various types of MS Word documents than MS Word itself does.
> It's less confusing to have one os (all linux) than two
Yep. Pretty much everything I own runs Linux, so no matter what device I'm working on the shell interface is the same. On my phone I use the graphical interface most of the time, of course, but I _can_ open a command line and find out what's using al my storage space it just the same as I would on my work desktop, my laptops, my server, my NAS, my PBX, and anything else I own.
At my 8-5 job, the company-owned machine has the same bash shell, which works the same way, running on an OSX kernel instead.
...is that linux on the desktop is dead...has been...will forever be.
The only time I've ever had a problem opening anything in Office from someone else (regardless of version) was when the person sending it uses a non-standard font. Office doesn't embed them by default. So that's the only reason I ever ask for a pdf. But unless LibreOffice or OpenOffice embed non-standard fonts by default, they aren't going to help with that.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Perhaps you live in the real world, and not some MS simulation.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
msoffice based document interchange is so problematic that some people/industries just gave up and defected to PDF.
Except PDF is a publishing/printing format and completely different from DOC/RTF/ODT. Assuming you still want to edit the things, and they don't incorporate things like tables ect, RTF is a better option for a compatible editing format.
I'm all for GNU/Linux as much as everyone else, but Windows still has the compatibility card. You can't easily exchange documents with GNU/Linux and expect it to work. Fonts will be different. Style sheets will be different.
It's funny but Android is actually a better option since Office is available for it.
Windows isn't even compatible with itself. I wish people would stop that old lie. Take Microsoft office documents between Mac and Windows.
And if you cannot take a document made in Microsoft Office and open it in another computer in Microsoft Office, you are not in any way shape or form compatible.
On th eother hand, libre office PC Mac or Linux? Yes.
Despite your compatability meme, Microsoft Office is becoming the outlier, the incompatible suite.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Then you obviously don't remember when they changed over to the .docx/.xlsx format and the older versions of MS Office could not open them.
Yes but you usually don't run into this problem when using MSOffice because everyone in the office has the same Office. Seriously? No shit.
And if you send your standard document to a Mac Shop using Microsoft Office. No
And if you send your document to another place using a different version of Office?. No
Not very useful to have a gold standard that cannot leave your office.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yes but you usually don't run into this problem when using MSOffice because everyone in the office has the same Office....
Not all offices have the same version of MS Office installed throughout the office. I've been at companies that have had three different versions of MS Office installed, and they did have issues with exchanging documents.
It's called the "No True Microsoft Office" fallacy.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If you are going to assume everybody is running the same office suite then you won't have any compatibility issues whether you choose MS Office, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Corel or stone tablets.
Nice try.
Can't believe you guys are falling for this argument.
Troll: Linux office suites won't work due to incompatibilities with other office suites. ./: But people have the same problem with MS Office ./: Misses the point and argues the accuracy of the last statement instead of the inherent nonsensical unfairness of it.
Troll: But usually people all use the same version of MS Office so it is not a problem.
Moving form office to office, I've found that LibreOffice does better than MS Office at properly importing office documents from various versions of MS Office. YMMV.
Yes, I totally agree that importing is rarely a problem. However LibreOffice fails in many aspects. our publishing house made the switch to LibreOffice early this year after basic testing.
For a simple example that Writer is not fit for businesses: it cannot properly handle even basic tasks such as working with templates. Without an add-on it is not possible to change the template. Yes that's right. Only documents that are created based on templates are coupled to that template. The available add-on (templatechanger ) to change this is only available for the latest version via a user that added it to a bug report (many thanks for that btw) and only works with Writer. For Calc changing templates is simply not
Another function that is sorely lacking as an editor has been in MS Office since version XP, around ~2001 I think. If you receive a document from a freelancer it often has the wrong styles in it or only a few. To change this quickly in MS Office you load the tempalte you want. Select the style that is wrong, click select all instances followed by a double click on the style you want. This way you can quickly fix documents.
I find the default colors of LO's panel dreadful. There are better colors available though, such as http://extensions.libreoffice.... Why are these not used or given as an option?
If you save a file on a NAS and select Tools/Share Document so more people can simultaneously work in it, often the formatting of the file changes randomly between saves. Old formatting often re-appears.
Calc cannot properly handle conditional formatting. This morning I created a Calc document with a cell that could have one of three colors based on the content of three other columns. I then copied the formatting to more cells in the column. After saving the document only the first cell formatting is kept, the formatting in the other column cells is lost.
For our publishing house LO mostly suffices, but there are many ways in which it has to improve for other business to even consider it.
Wrong, there is a compatibility pack that can be installed. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
This space for rent.
Sure you could install it, but either you couldn't print or the prints didn't match. We had to upgrade the remainder to make it work.
And 2013 vs 2007 is awful also... conditional formatting is problematic among other things, and the compatibility info workaround doesn't usually tell you specifically what to change or where to change it.
Strangely enough, LibreOffice / OpenOffice have better compatibility with Office files, especially with damaged files.
We've had numerous issues with 2007 / 2013 for things such as conditional formatting. Office XP vs 2007 was ugly also. It's becoming necessary to roll out the same version of Office to all users.
They can afford that because of the license fee savings for not using windows.
The geek has been running this tired old nag around the track since 1995. It was a bullshit argument then and it is a bullshit argument now.
The price of the mass market OEM system install is and always has been a trivial part of the expense of owning a home PC. There will be the monthly bills for broadband services, the expense of consumables like ink and paper...
It's less confusing to have one os (all linux) than two (linux in the office, windows at home.
The home user has different needs and values than the office worker --- to say nothing of the office manager. These markets began to diverge as early as the introduction of the Apple II and with the introduction of Windows 95, the divide had become a chasm as broad as the Grand Canyon.
The home market is a tough nut to crack - and it isn't just about the games.
The 4K monitor at a mass market prices implies the sale of 4K HDTVs and 4K HD videos --- HEVC encoded ---- at a mass market price.
I run Linux as a desktop environment at work in my job as a sysadmin, the only time I ever fire up a Windows VM is for goto assist sessions. RDP/VNC/TeamViewer work fine for remote desktop, vmware web view works fine for server admin, I use Office 365 Web and OWA for e-mail, and I have had Evolution configured for Office 365 exchange support. The groupware stuff is a total myth, it works.
You still let the printer settings and built-in styles to reformulate your documents and don't embed the fonts? In fact, these settings shouldn't be scattered all over the user interface like in most word processors. Many years of human labour has been wasted because of this.
There will never be an explicit plan to go back to MS. There are too many egos involved - heads may roll if this is perceived as anything other than a huge success. Remember this is a government bureaucracy with all the inherent office politics. It could get embarrassing.
I'm sure they have made provisions for people who absolutely need to use MS products. If they ever want to go back to windows, they will expand the use-case requirements for a windows PC until over time, it becomes a checkbox on a form for new employees.
What kind of publishing house uses a word processor rather than a typesetting or design program for output at all?
It's a pity they killed Google Wave, it had great potential to become THE enterprise groupware, offering whatever Outlook ever had or will but powerful and oriented towards knowledge sharing. It also was designed to be federated, which meant users from different servers (companies) could share wavelets.
Today there is a major IT company moving from email to a Wave-like product, bluekiwi, which is proprietary and isolated (no federation). It has very similar goals as Wave (to share information between users and build knowledge interactively), but much more limited: it cannot be expanded easily as Wave.
Google lost an opportunity by releasing Wave too early and without a clear view on its target. They thought it would be the replacement of email and social networks, but the perfect fit for it was the enterprise groupware. They would have killed Outlook and Exchange with a much better product. Maybe this vision did not fit their business, gathering data from users, and that's what killed it. What a shame.
Now it is a stagnant project with bad name and nobody knows they want it.
Somebody creates some MS-Access app that the company comes to rely on, then that person leaves.
Nobody knows the code, or even the password. When you have to upgrade that desktop, you may find yourself in a difficult situation.
You are going to have issues with setting up access rights, and many other problems.
IMO: put databases on the server, where they belong.
That said: it's true, MS-Access is a much better desktop database than anything offered in Linux.
thats the whole point. if old versions of MS Office can't open or format other versions properly, you have the same compatibility problem. Data formats must be OPEN then all programs that use it, can freely interoperate and then bad formatting is a programming issue not a data format issue
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I do style substitution on a weekly basis, using "find and replace" dialog (click Selectby Style). And regex search is also quite handy for cleaning formatting mess. And that worked already well in 2002...
Mobile is nothing more than glorified Gaming and Facebook toys. You can't accomplish any real work and you know this.
why would you even need a typesetter (like QuarkXpress) or design program to produce a single stream of text (i.e. a novel?).
A lot of technical documentation simply requires something more than a text editor but much less than a full blown typesetting package (like Quark or Indesign) which is comparable to the 'using MS Word to write a 2 line memo'.
In the days when 'Desk Top Publishing' was just taking off the biggest problem was actually the ability to make copy 'print ready' - i.e. pagination, crop marks, basic layout to output to either Litho plates or film. Even so, in the place I worked at for years it was still quicker to use a 'text editing' package (like MS Word but we're talking 1989/1990's), output the 'text' to film and used the skilled workers to slice up that film to make it print ready than put it all through a typesetting package like (I forget now but I think Aldus Pagemaker), as it took longer to faff about with the pagination and text that way.
Sure when you have some nice booklet or something that requires a modicum of graphic design, typesetting packages are great. But slews of text that require little more than chapters and page numbers (and maybe the odd illustration), 'word' packages are more than adequate.
What has changed significantly as I see it now is the workflow. You just make all this stuff print ready by making it a PDF and manipulate that before outputting direct to plate or digital printing. So in reality it often matters little what package you use - as long as the images keep their resolution and you don't need too complex four colour seps and can output to PDF.
The biggest problem is that now every man and his dog thinks that they can produce 'good design' or you get the file formats of all sorts of proprietary packages that is in your interest to keep the software around for that one-off but lucrative job.
Are you really using either Word or LibreOffice to produce your actual products, or just for BS internal business docs? Expect to go out of business if the first, as you don't actually have the skills to be a professional publisher..
Were the assertion true, one could just say that the oldest trick in the trade is to create and evolve document standards so they ensure a captive market. In fact look at Google Docs as a similar example. Google Docs and Google Drive are really not compatible with the outside or with standards, although they are better now than they once were. Microsoft is going to keep pushing Office formats so that any of the work-alikes will do most but not all of the claimed functionality, even if it doesn't really matter. They understand the psychology of brand recognition enough so that ignorant consumers will pay for their products even if they will never use the added features or if a free alternative never failed to import Office documents, or it the incompatability either didn't matter or was fixable.
You should get an account. The reason is that Word isn't designed for publishing. Word is just beginning to handle ligatures in English, it is far from handling them in complex languages like Arabic or Hindi. Office 2010 and 2013 have made huge strides in this regard. Word doesn't handle spacing between lines, letters and words entirely properly for readability. Certainly, kerning, tracking and spacing are screwed up. Here is a classic text only image of Word (left) vs. InDesign(right) http://www.thebookdesigner.com...
Take a look at the 3rd paragraph spacing. That's what's wrong with Word for text.
For a simple example that Writer is not fit for businesses: it cannot properly handle even basic tasks such as working with templates.
Don't foget macros. I've been switching over to LibreOffice and this is probably the single biggest issue i have. Word has a nice built-in IDE for creating VBA macros, and LibreOffice has fuck all. Its IDE has no IntellSense equivalent, and figuring out how to code in it is very difficult. As for coding in other languages, they all seem to require a Java Runtime Environment for some strange reason.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
There are NO show stoppers in Linux.
Proprietary vendors will LOCK you.
Casteism
Outlook compatibility between Mac OSX and Windows is even worse. I was trying to help a program director at a hospital setup Outlook on a Macbook Air he was given to use when traveling.
He keeps almost no paper in his office and has 60 Gbytes across 20 PSTs stored on a network share, all mapped into Outlook 2010 on his Windows desktop machine at work. When I tried to replicate that setup on the Macbook so he can access his PSTs once he's connected to VPN, I found out that Outlook for Mac doesn't support the Windows PST file format and would have to import and convert them all.
Instead, I told him to RDP to his Windows desktop and open Outlook from there.
Outlook compatibility between Mac OSX and Windows is even worse. I was trying to help a program director at a hospital setup Outlook on a Macbook Air he was given to use when traveling.
Oh yes, I should have mentioned Outlook, and the nightmares when we switched the Macs over to it. That was shortly before I retired, so it didn't affect me as much, so it slipped the ol noggin.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.