enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[Bjoern Michaelsen <bjoern.michaelsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 09:51:22AM +0100, ballock wrote:
> 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.

Thats indeed the way to go IMHO. Migrate to LibreOffice on Windows first
everywhere, then to Ubuntu.

> 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.

Archiving everything as (MS-Office generated) PDF should be the way to go. As
you can embed OpenDocument in PDF:

> http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/03/the-magic-of-editable-pdfs/index.htm

one might even consider to combine these: Having a MS Office-generated PDF with
a ODT inside it. That would represent the document as is would have been
printed by MS Office without modification. It would still "change" when being
edited -- but that is a general problem even between MS Office versions, and as
the document is edited anyway should be fixable.

LibreOffice can create these "editable PDF" natively, but then you have a
LibreOffice-rendered PDF. Doing the same with a MS-Office-rendered PDF
including a ODF representation should be possible though with a bit of
scripting.

> 2. What happens when the document is edited interchangeably in MS
> Office and LibreOffice? Problems with conversion will happen
> multiple times.

IMHO that should simply be avoided. Use LibreOffice on Windows too.

> 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.

There certainly is skill available for that at LibreOffice. Also note that
LibreOffice starts to get a certification program off the ground:

 http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/

that will assure you, that you can trust your partner to be capable of solving
your issues. 

> 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.

LibreOffice warns about the loss of fidelity on export. As you would expect, I
recommend to save to ODF -- MS Office can read that by now, but more
importantly: If MS Office fails at reading it, you still have it in the native
format without any loss of the original creation.

> 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.

For ODF that should not happen really. For other formats, it might and is
unavoidable. E.g. if LibreOffice improves the docx import to handle documents
generated by MS Office better, it is bound to display a LibreOffice exported
document different than before. Thats pretty much an unavoidable of the
improvement, not allowing for that would mean to never improve the
import/export filters.
 
> 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.

I have met quite a few people involved in the Linux migration in the City of
Munich, both at the LibreOffice conference and at the UDS (they are going to
use Ubuntu now). They might share some of their real world experiences. I will
ask them to join.

Best,

Bjoern