Collabora Office: The enterprise-ready edition of LibreOffice
collaboraoffice.com
collaboraoffice.com
They won't do under-20 count licensing. If your org/corp is under 20-count, just use it.
So far, it has been 98% perfect. One or two hiccups, yet: we own our data, in our Debian servers. Android app works awesome. Browser works awesome.
Give it a go if you want.
It seems like the entire thing is under a FOSS license. https://www.collaboraoffice.com/terms/collabora-online-mplv2...
I fear they are misunderstanding how commoditised office software has become.
Most individuals don’t need anything like this type of support. But if you’re a large company or government, it’s required.
Even the LibreOffice people agree it doesn't really seem to be required. Hence their panic.
> It is routinely the case that I meet organizations that have deployed free LibreOffice without long term support, with no security updates etc. Try the Cabinet Office in the UK (at the center of UK Government), or a large European Gov't Department I recently visited - 15,000 seats - with some great FLOSS enthusiasm, but simply no conceptual frame that deploying un-supported FLOSS in the enterprise hurts the software that they then rely on. Or a giant Pharma company in the news right now; companies do it left & right.
Or maybe there was a power outage and I "lost" the latest version of that important presentation I was working on, then closed out of the recovery window—how can I get back to where I was?
What if I forget my online credentials?
What if a document isn't formatted like I expect it to be, because I'm using the application wrong?
Note that the question I'm asking is the same question that the LibreOffice themselves are panicking about!
Microsoft also provides many different ways to install/deploy Office products for enterprises. In fact, one of the biggest selling point of the O365 enterprise tier is flexibility in deployment/installation options.
Collabora's support model allows companies to outsource that support responsibility, similar to http://electric.ai/
Does it make financial sense for their users? I don't know. But I can see the value proposition for someone making office software purchasing decisions, especially if they're concerned about a lesser-known brand like LibreOffice, or think open source software is inherently less reliable.
Or maybe HR receives resumes and a certain percentage don’t open because of a bug.
Then there’s stuff beyond bugs. There’s training and migration for people who’ve been using MS Office all their lives. There’s early access to RCs. There’s support if you want to learn how to deploy within your enterprise rules. Maybe your enterprise gives employees locked down laptops and the way their laptops are locked down prevents a new update from working.
Finally, you may have migrated and would like to use a portion of the money you’re saving by switching away from the Microsoft solution (which is significantly more expensive for enterprises) to keep the solution that allows you to save that money supported.
Now ok the problem was caused by them in the first place, but support was easy up contact, I didn’t wait long and they fixed the problem.
Corporations use a lot of fancy tech like Citrix, VDIs, remote application management software, securuty software, etc. They can often end up with weird problems with software compatibility and need vendor support.
How has your experience been than an installed libreoffice? I have this thing where like 5-7 users have to work on a network share drive on "xls" files. For over 15 years now we have worked on this setup whereby everyone knows the folder structure, the naming scheme among other things. I want to try this browser thing for "collaborative editing" which isnt present in excel or libreoffice desktop but i fail to understand how i can manage this.
do i have to map the network drive over to the browser engine? do i open the network drive as always and double click the file to run in browser?
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_...
Keep in mind that every development version (even the official one) has a maximum limit of 20 concurrent connections.
I'm happy to see someone polish up LibreOffice and ask money for it, I'd gladly market that to my family who complains about this ugly shit I install for them and my continuing refusal to help them maintain their accustomization with Microsoft products if they're not willing to paying for it, but if I have to even ask for a trial, it's not going to be worth it.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dgc4ix/can_anyone_ex...
From what I understand, a LibreOffice instance is created on a server for every user and the rendered interface is transferred to users via some remote-desktop-like way. This leads to lags and generally very poor performance compared to GoogleDocs.
I think the world badly needs a GoogleDocs-like office suite that would be a libre software, would support concurrent editing and would ODT as its default file format. But so far, such product does not exist, unfortunately.
As good as LibreOffice may be (I personally think it is _not_ better than Google docs) and as much as I like the romantic idea of open source office suite, I don't believe this will be successful/sustainable in the long run. The bulk of office suite users are not interested on using alternatives. These users want office running on their machine, period. I'd even venture to say that most users would rather have apps installed instead of Microsoft Office Online.
>I'd even venture to say that most users would rather have apps installed instead of Microsoft Office Online.
I dunno. Maybe if they rarely share documents? But, for me, online sharing and collaborative editing of documents has been a game changer.
I thought there was a newer LWN article that touched on more recent developments but can't find it
Collabora Online moves out of The Document Foundation
From what I can see / understand is that there a few large corporations / govts whatever you like that provide financial support in the form of the Pareto distribution. One or two organizations provide the majority of support (85%+). What this usually means is that the organization(s) pays for support, has the company like Collabora write all the code, and in the end they just take what they want and either re-implement it in a different way or actually have a whole different product than the "public" one. This has a double-edge effect; the few organization who pay for all the time for programmers implement the features they want (why not? they foot the bill) and the developers end up building a product that may or may not be good for the rest of the users. Case in point with LibreOffice and Collabora. Collabora pushes most all the commits, yet they are an online version of an office suite to plugin to Nextcloud, etc.
To be honest, LibreOffice should be charging for their product. I'm not sure how they would or what the mechanism would be, but it's great software and has $ value.
Collabora Office is integrated with NextCloud though.
The first two is mainly for German users, the last one is for international ones.
It's a catch 22 to focus software development on duplicating a UI that will comfort people who will never use your software over the software you're duplicating - or if they do, they do it because you're the one they don't have to pay for.
Apropos to nothing, Firefox is an interesting project.
(Collabora Online is a fork of LibreOffice Online I ... think.)
But whatever, maybe I google wrong