
LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365 - Garbage
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3014654/open-source-tools/libreoffice-as-a-service-offers-alternative-to-google-docs-office-365.html
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lucb1e
From the demo I saw, it worked as well as watching 1080p YouTube in a third
world country. Someone figured it was smart to do server-side rendering and
load your document as tiles using a technology designed for maps (the same as
used in OpenStreetMap, and there it works well, because that's _actually a
map_ and not a document). The person argued WiFi was bad, but when typing on a
100mbps symmetric connection there was still a noticeable delay between my
keystroke and it appearing on screen.

Edit: to everyone saying they also can't watch YouTube 1080p without
lag/buffering/whatever: perhaps it's not perfect _anywhere_ outside the third
world, but I could imagine that there it would suck even more. It's just a
comparison, not a research paper.

~~~
spdionis
> implying that watching youtube in 1080p is not easier in third world
> countries compared to first world... (looking at you Europe).

~~~
rplnt
I though Europe had much better access to fast and cheap Internet compared to
USA? Lowest offering from my ISP is 100/10 for around $16. No problems with HD
video. Especially not with Youtube's interpretation of HD.

~~~
eloisant
Europe is made of many independent countries with different regulations and
different operators.

In France it's €30 for triple-play, €20 for Internet only, but less than 50%
have access to optical fiber. For more than half it's still ADSL. It works
great if you live close to the telephone exchange, otherwise it can be very
slow.

~~~
datburg
Grouping is a habit common by Americans, that I am still not able to grasp.
They say Africans, Arabs, Asians, poor countries, third-world countries,
Europe, Asians, etc. I specially hate it when they say I went Africa and now
"The Muslims" all thrown together in politics, ugh.

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DiabloD3
To those claiming that Office 365 somehow promotes web apps as your real
apps... that isn't entirely true.

My company (the one I started, hi) uses Office 365, and all three of us use
Office 365's full office suite, the actual real desktop app one.

What we use Office 365's cloud stuff for is their Exchange cluster (oh God, so
delicious), and for OneDrive for Business (ie, what used to be Sharepoint).

Browsers just aren't fast enough to handle web apps that large (not picking on
Office 365's web apps, anything that big just sorta murders browsers), and I
don't think they ever will be. This isn't something you can solve when your
only tools are HTML, CSS, and JS.

~~~
pidg
+1 for Office 365. I wasn't convinced until I actually started working at a
company that uses it properly. The collaboration features in the native
desktop apps work beautifully.

Not having to endure emailed-round documents with multiple competing versions
like "Report-Dec2015 Draft v5(FP,PL,KM) (2).doc" is worth the price of entry
alone.

I feel sorry for those like the UK government who've been successfully lobbied
by The Document Foundation into using open standards, and are now locked in to
using one vendor - Collabora - and their proprietary fork of LibreOffice.

~~~
martin-adams
Documents in emails for you to review is devastating. I have a client who
keeps doing it. The first thing I do is download it, upload it to Google Docs
and turn on Suggestion Editing. Collaborative cloud based document editing is
such a life saver.

~~~
jo909
How do you know if the sending party is okay with you uploading their document
to a public cloud service?

~~~
martin-adams
A valid point. In this instance, I know because we use Google Apps and store
most other things in it. The email is in Gmail, so the difference isn't really
that great when you think about it.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to guarantee a 'secure' delivery of
documents via email. SMTP might be used rather than SMTPS and you don't always
know what servers handle the email when in transit.

~~~
e12e
> The email is in Gmail

> As far as I can tell, there is no way to guarantee a 'secure' delivery of
> documents via email.

Well, if neither of you forwards to an external account, gmail->gmail email
should be pretty "secure" (against other adversaries than Google, those that
have hacked one of your Google accounts, and those that Google cooperate with
(if any)).

It's not clear by what you write if someone@example.com is emailing
you@gmail.com (And so should know that Google knows all the things), or if you
meant that you both use Gmail - or if _you_ use Google Apps, so you already
give all your emails to Google, but not in a way that is transparent to the
sender (however, if the sender doesn't use any kind of end-to-end
encryption...).

Not meant as a nitpick -- just pointing out that for some values of "secure"
using a single provider for email can be "more secure".

I suppose the "enterprise" alternative would be to have accounts in cross-
trusted AD with client-certificates and use S/MIME for client-client end-to-
end encryption. In which case (AFAIK) by default, there'd be the possibility
of keeping an escrow key.

(The open alternative would probably be to just use Gnu Privacy Guard)

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sandGorgon
This is wasted effort IMHO. The killer app of Office is Excel and NOTHING has
come close to replacing it.

In India, almost all laptop manufacturers give the option of preloaded Ubuntu.
Yet people choose to pay for Windows - for either Excel or Photoshop.

I would pay a large sum of money for a compatible spreadsheet. It is well
worth doing a startup around.

Everything else - Word or PowerPoint already has reasonable substitutes. Even
if it is as simple as a PDF doc.

But there is no substitute for Excel.

~~~
unixhero
Although you're not wrong. Excel is the killer app. Word is ALSO the killer
app for heavy lifting writing papers etc. It's the program I suffered the
least in during my uni years, and I tried them ___ALL___.

As an investment analyst for VC, I also need to make A LOT of powerpoint
presentations. Not a lot of slides, but I need to convey complex points in a
short amount of slides. This makes me push Powerpoint to its limits and it
also comes with no REAL competition elsewhere, I've tried __every
alternative__. Nothing comes close to the robustness of MS Office,
unfortunately.

~~~
sandGorgon
Hmm interesting. I have had people switch over to keynote.

What do you think about that?

~~~
unixhero
It sure is good :).

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stephenr
Is there _still_ not a reasonable quality, open-source browser based 'office'
app? Open Document is all XML right, so it's not like a browser _can 't_
read/write the format because its some binary blob..

~~~
oever
There is WebODF, which is 100% pure client-side JavaScript.

[http://webodf.org/](http://webodf.org/)

[http://webodf.org/demo/](http://webodf.org/demo/)

~~~
pascalmemories
I never knew about this until now. That looks pretty amazing and I can see all
sorts of potential.

There's all sorts of debate above about office 365 (some reads more like slick
advertising astro-turf - people really shouldn't bite at that stuff) but this
could be great for many web based business automation apps. I can think of a
few things I've done in the past this would have been great for. I see it's
already being built in to Zafara and Roundcube.

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kriro
In principal I like this idea a lot. Office as a Service but in freer...sign
me up.

As an aside I use LO as sort of a middleware for document conversion via PyOO
(start headless LO, convert/load/creat documents etc. via Python script). I
think UNO is rather complicated to use at least I struggle everytime I try to
read the documentation (possible that I'm too dumb). I hope LO as a service
helps make this use case more interesting and thus leads to more documentation
and PyOO like libraries. I feel like there's some potential to get LO into
more widespread use by improving/advertising the "headless LO" more.

Oh I'm building this webservice...yeah sure upload your files as Excel or
Calcs...we can use that and create nice Calc documents from either one.
Powered by LO.

~~~
riccardom
If you are interested in document conversion using LO and python you can give
it a try to [https://github.com/xrmx/pylokit](https://github.com/xrmx/pylokit)
which is a python cffi wrapper for the stable api of LibreOfficeKit.

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hunvreus
I quit using Microsoft Office over a decade ago. The last few years, I relied
on LibreOffice but couldn't stand the regular crashes, bugs and overall
frustrating user experience.

I gave Google Docs another go and I must say I was surprised at how much
better it was from 3 or 4 years ago. It was good enough for me to consider
using Google Drive; me and my team are now using it for everything and
couldn't be happier. We actually ditched Dropbox in the process.

Box, Dropbox, Microsoft and other players in this segment of enterprise
productivity software should be worried. I'm happy to pay for it and wouldn't
run a company without it.

I think a LibreOffice SaaS would have a hard time competing on features with
Google Docs, let alone price.

~~~
jhwhite
Does Google Sheets offer the data analysis tools that Excel does? Or do you
have no need for that?

~~~
hunvreus
I know it does formulas and charts. We use it for various things; some
accounting, budgets, cash forecasting, marketing metrics...

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niutech
There are already WebODF ([http://www.webodf.org](http://www.webodf.org)),
used in ownCloud Documents, and OnlyOffice
([http://onlyoffice.org](http://onlyoffice.org))

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rwmj
My company did this back in 2000 using StarOffice which was the precursor to
LibreOffice (via OpenOffice). Some screenshots[1]. What's interesting is that
the numbers don't add up - it's hard to make a profit even at high
subscription rates when you have to pay for all the hardware involved. Anyway,
I hope they know what they're doing.

[1]
[https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content)

~~~
davidgerard
Previous news reports posit this work as part of Collabora's deal with
.gov.uk.

The thing they're offering up is a downloadable VM for you to play with.
Something you could actually set up an in-office version of; something that
people can use _and report bugs on._

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bobajeff
It would be cool if they made a client side version of this using Emscripten.

~~~
oever
It's coming.
[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Emscripten](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Emscripten)

~~~
riccardom
Don't hold your breath, i think that emscripten port development is stalling.

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mark_l_watson
As a Linux user, I really like the web versions of the Office365 apps. The
functionality is good for situations when I need to work with other people's
documents and not taking up disk space for installed apps is a fine feature
for the new world of SSD storage on laptops.

I also find Google docs handy to use, even though I use markdown stored in the
cloud for writing my own content, managing research notes, etc.

I like the idea of being able to self host cloud services but ownCloud and
LibreOffice face stiff functionality competition.

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ucaetano
It's a bit sad to see LibreOffice struggling to maintain relevance when the
market it tried to address suddenly became [nearly nonexistent] irrelevant.

It reminds me of all those hundreds of early 20th century battleships that
suddenly became completely irrelevant when the Dreadnought came by.

[Edit: replaced nearly nonexistent with irrelevant to make my point clearer]

~~~
downtide
Which market are you referring to?

I still crave for a really nice word processor, spreadsheet, and easy database
app (in the style of Access). I've always found *Office a bit rough around the
edges.

My partner recently brought home an iPad from work. Word failed to play well
with other (MS Word) Office documents, so file exchange and formats are still
a complete pain in the neck. I will be using plain text until something better
comes along.

~~~
ucaetano
I think we can all agree that you're not representative of the market, and to
be honest, I'd guess (with no data to back it up) that the majority of readers
here aren't as well.

~~~
downtide
I wouldn't say I was representative of the market. But I would like a good
product. How do you define the market?

~~~
ucaetano
People who would like a product/service and are willing to pay enough (in the
required scale) for that product/service to exist.

The current core market for office productivity suites are business, followed
by consumer. And I'd bet only a very small minority of those are sticking with
plain text files until something better comes along.

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rullelito
I can't stand LibreOffice, it's so slow compared to Office.

So I don't have high hopes for this thing.

~~~
workitout
I use both, how is LibreOffice slow?

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moonbug
And I thought it couldn't be possible to make LO any more infuriating to use.
Well done guys, trebles all round.

------
unixhero
Besides dude. Referring to poor countries as belonging to the third world
implies that a second world exist. The second world collapsed with the Soviet
Union and does not exist any longer. The preferred nomenclature is developing
countries.

~~~
function_seven
> The preferred nomenclature is developing countries.

This term has always reeked of over-euphamism to me. I'm not arguing that
"third-world" is any better, but what do I call countries that _aren 't_
developing? Right now, "developing countries" is used both to refer to
countries that are actually developing (Kenya, for example) and as a polite
way of saying "poor countries" (e.g. Somalia).

Seems like we should have a term that doesn't confuse the two. When I hear
"developing countries", I mentally substitute an image of the most
impoverished areas of our world.

Sorry if off-topic...

~~~
lentil_soup
also, "developing countries" tries to establish an absolute rank and a
division between countries. What are you taking into account when you say
"developed", money? health? happiness? depending on what you use you'll get
way different groups of countries

~~~
unixhero
I would be happy to deep dive on this one, as I several of my 1000-level
poltical science courses covered what we think of and how we classify and rank
countries.

The most basic thought is to begin at the lowest common denominator. What is
it that all countries will agree to when placed into comparison. That is the
United Nations Human Development Index (HDI). It contains Life expectancy at
birth. Education index: Mean years of schooling and Expected years of
schooling. A decent standard of living: GNI per capita (PPP US$).

Now from here you could rank GROSS DOMESTIC HAPPINESS, but that is a garbage
index if you ask me as a political scientist and a champion of the free world.
The top grossing country on that list is a country that imprisons and
tortures.

But I gather it makes sense to triangulate the facts from the CIA World
Factbook, Heritage Foundation Freedom Index which covers press freedom and the
extent of freedom of speech, and a sprinkle of transparency thus the
Corruptions Perception Index from Transparency International. Now whether
you're east thinking or west thinking you might also want to include another
sprinkle of Amnesty International and quantify or qualitatively add its
reportings to the mix.

What you will find that the initial HDI gives a pretty darn clear and precise
estimate of where you would want to live and where in the world could be
deemed as "developing" as in not yet reached the top-end of the list.

This is a scientific endavour, and it is not meant to hurt anybody's feelings.

Also: You can downvote me or upvote me as much as you want. This is how the
real world approached this problem.

