enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[ballock <boleslaw.tokarski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, Atul,

> I wanted to really understand is LibreOffice still not a suitable alternative to MS Office?

Why? Of course LibreOffice is a suitable alternative to MS Office. I am 
using it everyday and it works very well.

When you consider using it in the enterprise you face a number of 
concerns though:
1. What happens to MS Office on other machines? There is LibreOffice for 
Windows, so you can change all machines to use LibreOffice. There are 
companies that used Open/LibreOffice from the start, they have no 
problems then. Those that did not - have a number of MS Office documents 
that may not look the same in LibreOffice.
2. What happens when the document is edited interchangeably in MS Office 
and LibreOffice? Problems with conversion will happen multiple times.
3. Whatever said, Microsoft Office competes with LibreOffice. Although 
it needs competition not to get regulated in the US due to its monopoly 
and it paid some of LibreOffice development (through Novell 
co-operation), still nobody will officially support document compatibility.

> Is applications too much dependent on MS Office in our enterprise?
Aside from people being used to MS Office look&feel, we have a number of 
VB scripts for accounting, a Tieto template wizzard and I guess a number 
of other things that would need to be re-written for LibreOffice. We did 
not find internal competence for this, I know David Partain was more 
lucky in his company with LibreOffice templates.

With 2 Office tools I would recommend to use the original tool for 
editing the document and the other tool for read-only access. If you 
made a .doc or .xls file with MS Office, only allow people to *view* it 
in LibreOffice (as it works quite well). Most probably they will not 
even know that the file looked differently or contained some stuff in 
between.

I believe there is a number of LibreOffice specific extensions as well, 
a scripting language, some Java based extension, equation editor and 
drawing stuff. If you opened the file in MS Office (I believe there are 
converters *from* LibreOffice to MS Office as well), well, good luck. 
The person editing and saving the spreadsheet will not even know he has 
just removed most of the back-end scripts.

I would not like to be held responsible for a decision that broke a 
number of corporate documents. Nor support people with document-related 
problems. That is just out of my scope.

I also had some concerns with OpenOffice <-> LibreOffice compatibility 
as I heard documents looked differently there as well. I did not yet 
address those, though I know we should officially support Lucid and 
Precise here.

I believe we have someone from LibreOffice around, perhaps he can shed 
some more light on this? Most of my claims are not based on extensive 
tests, please do not feel offended.

Cheers,
Ballock