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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

Google docs has to become office in terms of feature parity faster than office online has to match google docs because the microsoft price point is comparable to the standalone. Microsoft can always push people to use the native word and excel apps for certain features because it's covered in the cost of the 365 sub, but google can't do the same because it's a separate cost.

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Yea, I agree.

I'm also amazed at how much suckage people are willing to put up with in O365, but still consider it a better choice than Google Docs for the company.

Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

Or at least, it's not the biggest factor when considering making year+ commitments to one office suite or another.

Price, familiarity and feature-richness are definitely in MS favor.

Isn't OneDrive replacing SharePoint?

No. They don't really accomplish the same goals, and SharePoint Online is still a going concern.

That said, just as Skype and Skype for Business are very different beasts under the hood, One Drive and One Drive for Business are also quite different, the latter being shoehorned on top of SharePoint.

OneDrive and Sharepoint are the worst part of O365. After the simplicity of Dropbox "one big drive in the cloud", it's a real pain to figure out how you're supposed to work with OD/SP - and good luck doing it without a dedicated fulltime SP admin.

Not since they replaced the OneDrive for Business Client: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Transition-from-the...

AFAIK, it's all basically OneDrive under the hood now. Which is great because all the Groove/SharePoint based syncing was awful before.

Maybe from a tech perspective, but the SharePoint "brand" is still heavily used in O365 enterprise for the same file-syncing stuff that OneDrive does in consumer-services.

Which brings up another O365 nit, MS has these direct consumer services and O365 services all on different account silos such that when I log into O365 I have to go through a decision tree that answers two levels of questions about which _account_ my company email address is referring to: MS Personal vs Organization Issued vs Organization but Personally Created (not sure how the last category exists)

it says at the bottom if you want to avoid the decision tree to rename your personal account. pick a second username and the problem goes away.

OneDrive for Business = rebrand of Sharepoint storage, hence the complete separation from OneDrive's consumer (fka Windows Live Mesh) stuff

They seem to be parallel services, like Lync and Skype. I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??

Outlook for Android is the biggest piece of shit to hit mobile and O365 on the web takes a huge smelly dump on linux users. I am still angry at my employer for foisting this garbage upon us, just so the nontechnical exec team can have their precious Outlook

Do they have IMAP or ActiveSync disabled? You should be able to find compatible replacement clients.

> "like Lync and Skype"

Lync has been renamed to Skype For Business, and is very similar in terms of user experience to the standard Skype app.

> "I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??"

You can hardly blame Microsoft for the slack IT policies at your workplace.

Skype for Business and Skype are two completely different, just barely compatible things. They run completely different networking protocols, and the S4B client is still, barring some cosmetic skinning, the same as the Lync client from nearly four years ago. The About page in the S4B client may still be calling itself the Microsoft Lync Client - it was still doing so in the 2016 version of the client this spring...

What a colossal marketing cockup

Very few people care about networking protocols, and SFB is explicitly a business communication tool, meaning that most of your contact will be with people who also have SFB. As for the About page of SFB, I can't comment on what it was before, but I've just checked, it now says Skype For Business 2016.

I only know the details because I write software on top of some of the Lync/S4B APIs, and have to deal with customers that are completely confused why one Skype client they have for making calls works with our software, and their other Skype client with a nearly identical icon that they also use for making calls doesn't...

Which app do these users have? If they have SFB, does this not work?

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Let-users-add-exter...

Uh, the Mac client still says Lync, and it looks way different than Skype.

"Don't blame Microsoft for slack IT policies" What? Like hell I'm not blaming them. It's not my fault they offer a bunch of shitty, complicated, barely-working, overlapping, should-be-simple services that nontechnicals can barely wrap their mind around. It's not my fault my employer hired me to work on Linux code and then has a sudden Windows come-to-Jesus moment. (I'm sure theres some stupid sales rep to thank for that...) It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX!

If they would simply follow standards we wouldn't have this problem. But then of course Micro$oft wouldn't make as much ca$h, and we certainly cant have that now can we....

> "Like hell I'm not blaming them."

So Microsoft tell the employees at your company which places to store their documents do they? Why does your company not standardise on how documents are stored?

>"It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX"

Examples?

Then you haven't upgraded: https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/downloa...

Not unusual. Many orgs are still lagging on Win10 as well. They have contracts with things like cough anti-virus providers of ill repute cough and they cannot upgrade because these tools don't work.

We're rather fond of Windows 7, because it pretty much just works. (And nobody wants to deal with upgrading) A few of the handful of Win10 laptops have been headaches.

"Lagging" is an interesting choice of words...

Funny you say that. Know what I'm doing right now?

Re-encoding MP4s to a slight variant of MP4 so that my demos are visible to Win7 installs. Because they flip out. Known issue, I'm told, but not fixable. Win7 is frozen!

You may not like Win10, but I think Win7 is a ghastly experience that is about as fun as bamboo shoots under one's nails (for developers). It has 0 affordances for modern software development EXCEPT misapplications of the Windows UI. Oh, also before I forget: old Win7 font rendering is substantially uglier than new Win10 font rendering! Critical stuff!

If "just works for email" is your criterion, it's a mistake not to use Chromebooks in the first place.

I agree with you that people should upgrade to Windows 10 as soon as they can. But I'm curious about what you mean by misapplications of the Windows UI.

Well, it's not like you can expect Win7 to just doesn't magically support new file formats? Video is complicated and finicky, you'd be doing bullshit tasks like that for one reason or another

I feel your pain. As a tiny business we are still using old and obsolete WSS 2.0 on a Windows 2003 server. We looked into hosted sharepoint last year but the thing is so slow and cumbersome, it drained all happiness from my life. You can smell all the cludgy enterprise features that have been baked it over the years. Not at all fun for a small business that wants something simple that just works. We are dead set to migrate away to another system, something like GlassCube or Asana. The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting.

>"The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting."

Do you mean something like Tableau/QlikView/Pentaho/PowerBI?

http://www.tableau.com/

http://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlikview

http://community.pentaho.com/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

Those looks much more in-depth than we are looking for. Sharepoint datasheets lets you create, manage, and view datasets completely inside sharepoint. An end user, for instance, could create dataset of (for instance) company inventory. They can add custom columns with datatype, like inventory count, cost, status, condition, date purchased, etc. They can then create views to filter/sort/group data and display this in different places in a workspace. Data is entered and manage in sharepoint. Has lots of handy uses and you could train non-technical users with it. Replaced lots of excel spreadsheets.

Does a tool like Power BI Desktop not meet your needs? This video gives a quick overview of putting together a report and publishing it to a PowerBI reporting portal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA

I will check it out. Thanks for the link.

Outlook for Android is better than any of the alternative mail clients I can get on my phone. Although that is not saying much...

OWA works just fine on Chrome on Linux, I use it every day.

Sharepoint sucks, but then again the whole wiki/CMS/whatever category of things that Sharepoint is a representative of is almost without exception a huge festering cesspool of villainy and suck.

I just uninstalled Outlook for Android and my phone went from unusably-laggy to performing just like new. I had a full charge this morning and it is early afternoon and my battery was at 30%. Android's battery usage analyzer blamed 60% of that on Outlook. Opening Outlook and trying to use it meant 30+ seconds waits while I do simple things like "view the first page of my inbox" or "enter an email address into the To:" field.

You're saying that all the other options are worse??

(As for OWA, I regularly encounter full-page reloads for simple actions, am frequently logged out after my first click on anything, and it is almost obnoxiously slow for the speed of internet that we have. And this is Office365... previous versions of OWA were pretty good though)

Is it? "OneDrive for Business", as I understand, is (an interface to) SharePoint, and completely, aside from branding, different from consumer OneDrive.

Sharepoint is to Exchange as OneDrive is to Outlook.

Sharepoint is the server, Exchange is the server. The Sharepoint server hosts Web OneDrive like the Exchange server hosts OWA Outlook Web Access. If you want to use the desktop client for either, instead of the browser javascript, you can download and install the binary.

SharePoint has been crap in the past, I'd agree with that, and Outlook is poor when it comes to HTML standards, but the rest of O365 seems solid to me. Other than SharePoint, what in particular do you see as weaknesses in the O365 lineup?

> Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

With SharePoint I can share documents and directories with other people in my company.

As much as I think SharePoint is "mediocre", Google Doc is just shit when it comes to sharing[1].

[1] The only sharing google doc does well is sending a link to ONE SINGLE DOCUMENT to a bunch of people by EMAIL ONLY.

What's wrong with their sharing? I don't understand your comment in [1]

With a sharepoint, there is a single place where everything is stored, the sharepoint.

Everything there is accessible, visible and searchable (modulo access permissions). It's de-facto shared.

---

With a Google Drive, all contents is private, only visible by you, only accessible by yourself.

Other people can't access your stuff, people can't search your stuff, people can't even know what may or may not exist.

If you want to share something, you have to email a link a single specific document of yours to selected people (who will each individually have to accept the invite).

How do you keep track of what is shared? by who? to who? how do you share stuff to groups/teams/businessunit? Basically, google docs intuitively goes against everything you want to do in an entreprisey context.

It's easy to share a folder in Google Drive.

Everything you say also goes for Drive... Not sure what you mean?

You can share folders; also, check out Team Drive. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/21/google-opens-up-its-new-pr...

It's an early access feature, only available since a few days, if you request it personally to a google sales rep.

Yes. That's one of the thing they miss really bad for sharing. It should have been there for 10 years already.

Totally agree. With GDrive you can share a folder with a group of collaborators and anyone can modify or add to the files therein.

With Google Drive I can ALSO share documents and directories with other people in my company. I don't get your point

Yea, that probably wasn't a great example. I think at a basic file storage and sharing perspective the products offer about the same.

However, IMO comparing SharePoint to Google Drive is apples and oranges (and really OneDrive consumer is the appropriate comparison) SharePoint uses metadata and a content type model to organize everything, which is indexed so it can be searched on and have custom filters, views, and forms built off of it. It's a double edged sword though in that as much as it helps organize lots of documents, it also has a lot of maintenance overhead (and a lot of special nuances that people need to learn). It also supports a lot of features that are aimed at implementing simple business processes like workflows, versioning, and document templates.

More recent updates have been trying to gloss over a lot of the complexity and simplify the UI, to make it look more like a consumer level product I guess.

the new client syncs sharepoint document libraries fine. the only reoccuring problem i have right now is with excel files locking (for 10m??) after editing.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/sharepoint-online-sync-p...

I use sharepoint as a windows shared network folder. Don't have to use sync tools.

zeedrive?

the new onedrive client with selective sync is nice if you have something like say a 400mb autocad drawing youd rather not stream everytime you double click it. you can sync just the files in the group/documentlibrary you want.

There's also some new team drive coming to address this https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2016/11/google-team-dri...

Case in point. Google Drive should have had a workflow for teams and organisations since 10 years.

And here is the dilemma with competing with Microsoft:

Compete with Microsoft and forever spend your time with bug fixes, parity issues, and new features the other guy implements.

... OR create enough of the part that essentially means productivity app, but then branch out into your own space and create a product that differentiates itself and creates lock-in.

Google knows that doing the latter is like a dog forever chasing fox and never winning, so it eventually called timoeut on parity and branched off into doing something new and exciting.

What has google done which O365 isn't doing equally well? Google Docs just isn't very great.

Your may have been downvoted, but it's true. I work for a company that drank the Google coolaid and it was a dreadful decision.

Virtually no one uses Google Docs or Sheets. Instead, they struggle on without it, or have their department purchase an incredibly expensive version of Office.

The Google experiment has failed in our organisation. Google Groups and Gmail is a bit of a disaster. Google can't even do basic things, like relabel all email older than a certain date. And the admin interface is ridiculously slow, and frankly buggy. One time, I logged into this frequently used interface and discovered that I got prompted with a post it note every freaking time. That might not seem like much, but it slowed me down and we are under the pump at the moment.

Overall, Google has such great ideas but is totally let down by an utter lack of polish and a total inability to improve their UX, and ensure that they finish off features and products.

So much potential let down by incredibly simple UX errors. It's unbelievably disappointing :(

The thing about Google Docs is, it looks and has the same functionality now as it did circa ten years ago when I first remember using it. I'm not sure what that department in the Googleplex is occupying their time with.

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