Nantes Métropole completes switch to LibreOffice | Hacker News Reader

Nantes Métropole completes switch to LibreOffice

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84 pointsbuovjaga22 comments

I have recommended LibreOffice to several people but they all went back to MS Office due to compatibility and usability issues.

I really want LibreOffice to succeed but MS Office is a really tough competitor. Especially Excel is a very good piece of software.

This is my experience, too. I don't expect LibreOffice to have as good a UX as MS Office, but LibreOffice just isn't solid enough. I continue to use it, however.

I find that newer versions of Office (especially 2013 and 2016) support Open Document (e.g., .odt) better than LibreOffice supports Open XML (e.g., .docx).

I would certainly believe it, considering (naively) that one expects the cost of implementing a standard to be directly related to the length of that standard: checking the ISO Publicly Available Standards page[0], I found 6760 pages of Office Open XML standard (ISO 29500) and 1996 pages of Open Document Format standard (ISO 26300).[1]

[0] http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/

[1] The link to Technical Corrigendum 2 for Open Document Format in [0] is broken, so I included a version I found at https://www.nen.nl/pdfpreview/preview_166227.pdf, which was seven pages long.

In my experience, every problem boiled down to some weird MS Office quirk which, quite frankly, even occur among different MSO versions!

I'm French and while I'm generally in favor of usage of open-source by our public offices, I'm not sure moving to LibreOffice is an achievement to be proud of.

In 2016, can an office suite claim to increase "productivity" without any Cloud-based collaboration features built-in? It seems so old school, the rest of the world is moving on and once again, our public sector is left stuck in the past.

I understand the advantages of using an open format but AFAIK both Office or Google Docs can export to ODF for long term archival if needed.

Moving from Microsoft Office to Office 365 (or Google Docs) means shifting _more_ control towards the vendor - they not only control the application life cycle (and through that, licensing costs), they also control the document storage.

An open source office suite moves control away from office suite vendors to the public administration, and Libreoffice works pretty well with various document management systems.

As for live collaboration features: I'm not sure they're actually a high priority for the public administration, but even if so, that seems to be on the roadmap for https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-cloudsui... that will probably interoperate well with LibreOffice.

I guess that could also be supported by the native LibreOffice application in a future version - and if France needs that feature, it could pay french/EU developers to implement it, investing tax money locally.

LibreOffice Online is being worked on. A fairly recent presentation about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0AiIfeQCx4

LibreOffice dev team is impressively cleaning and extending the suite. Let's hope that more users will give them more motivation / resources to keep doing so and catch up on important features.

So you propose that French public sector data be sent on American servers ?

Microsoft has quite a few hosting locations in Europe - Ireland, Netherlands, Finland, Austria:

https://www.microsoft.com/online/legal/v2/?docid=25

Microsoft is still subject of US jurisdiction, having few hosting locations outside US will not change that.

It would be reckless for any non-US government to use any non-local services. (For exactly this reason, governments usually build their own datacentres).

Moving an administration to "the Cloud" seems like an extrardinary bad idea to me. Administrations do not move quickly for a reason. Their processes are bound to the law and they have to respect things most offices have no idea about.

Them doing it "old school" is a good thing. Old school is not bad, it's stable and reliable. It's everything you want from an administration.

And among the open source alternatives, LibreOffice is order of magnitudes ahead of other suites (except OpenOffice, is there any one actually?).

Moreover, having public documents written and stored in an open format is simply going back to sanity.

Really, criticizing this move because it's not "hip" enough seems reckless to me. I'm very happy that the process and procurement procedures exists in my government (I'm french too) to allow administration to switch if they want to.

Only other FOSS option I know of that's comparable is Calligra Suite. Then just smaller, not trying to be feature complete programs like Abiword and Gnumeric.

There's other good free as in beer options and cheaper alternatives to Microsoft Office though.

Well, you can have shared network drives. Dropbox. Or... google docs. I don't really know too much about the gov't's network policies but people tend to use the tools they know

"Nantes Métropole, France’s 6th largest city"

Actually Nantes Métropole is not a city, it's the regroupment of the city of Nantes and its suburbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Community_of_Nantes_M%C3...

You are right of course, but, for someone outside France, it doesn't matter that much.

In the U.S. at least we often refer informally to a metropolitan area as a city. For example, I work in an office that isn't in the city limits, but is instead outside the city by its airport (one of the busiest in the country). We still say we're in the city, even though we're about 20 miles away (though we do have the city in our mailing address, even though we're in the city limits of a suburb).

Right. The actual boundaries of a city are often the result of historical accident and depend on the governmental power structure of the region. "White flight" and "urban decay" cause people to live as close to a city as possible without actually living within it. I think the inclusive meaning is even truer in areas of greater sprawl, e.g. most of US and Asia. Los Angeles is a big city, but when people talk about LA they often mean the entire county or more.

A city might get away with using LibreOffice, a small business however cannot. The main problem is not the program but the file formats and compatibility to other MS products.

Also: in my personal opinion, LibreOffice is horribly stuck in the 90s. Again also: where's the PIM? WTH LibreOffice, WTH?!

This is because government is a monopoly. They don't need to cater to their clients in any way. So they can say "Fuck you, your MS word file doesn't work, send us something that does or we cut off your water." That motivates people. They can't fire their government or use a competitor.

I think people are not realizing that these deployments are happening in government for a reason.

My hometown of Munich switched much out its IT to Unix/ OpenOffice etc. in the 2000s, with mixed success: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

As far as I remember, one of the biggest issues is lack of compatibility with MS Office documents.

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