LibreOffice Developer Community Increasingly Robust 180
New submitter someWebGeek writes "LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors. The Document Foundation has published new stats that portray the climbing rates of developer involvement both in terms of numbers of people and numbers of code commits. One of the most encouraging aspects, as noted by Ryan Paul in an article at Ars, is that non-corporate code contributions by independent volunteers constitute the largest slice of the latest commit-pie."
Re:Large Deployments (Score:5, Interesting)
^this^
I would and could move my company to OpenOffice or LibreOffice.. but the lack of a mail server/client on par with Exchange/Outlook that is significantly lower in price to justify licensing it and not just going the MS route is the the largest barrier. If we get rid of MS Office we have to replace Outlook, if we keep Outlook only we might as well just license the whole suite so that we have working integration. If we LibreOffice had a mail client that had good exchange support and was on par with Outlook then we could move to dropping MS Office and only running exchange and buying cal's. While i know there are alternatives to exchange/outlook most of the good ones are not much cheaper to license.
Re:Large Deployments (Score:5, Interesting)
Wile I don't fit into that large deployment category, I do what I can to promote LibreOffice. We have roughly 100 desktops, and the reality is that well over half of them have no use for MS office in any real capacity. I. deploy LibreOffice to every workstation mainly to make sure everyone has at least that baseline functionality. I store all of my documentation and send out all of my memos etc in an open document format. even if very few people regualrly use LibreOffice to do anything more than read the stuff I send them or open the occasional word document attachment... At least they have been exposed to it, and I have actually had a few people ask me about it when they buy new computers, and see the price of MS Office. It's not much, admittedly, but it works. I'm not pushy about it, I don't evangelize... But they all get some exposure to it, and at least know that there are options when they are personally in the position to make that choice.
Stopped using office suites entirely (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately LibreOffice hasn't yet managed to fix the horrible memory footprint OO.o had, so I've switched to writing all text documents in TeX (using Lyx) and using Gnumeric for spreadsheets. But for opening files others send me, this is easily the best. It'll even make an excellent effort at rendering shitty formats like .doc.
Re:Large Deployments (Score:1, Interesting)
oh so thats why LibreOffice that seems to have a slightly less featureset than MS Office 2000 is slow as fuck on my linux machine ... thanks for clearing that up
Microsoft Office 97 was the last real innovative with a useful feature set office software. Seriously what do you expect to have in a word program to let you write medium long reports ? No one, and I mean no one would have upgraded from office 97 if Microsoft werent' introducing voluntary incompatibilites in its files formats. This is the truth.
Office productivity software is an evolutionary dead end, commercial or open source.
Never going to happen and shouldn't (Score:3, Interesting)
Also don't give me the "no other single program" bullshit - MS Exchange is a suite and a not entirely well integrated one at that. Take a look at any mailing list where MS Exchange admins post their cries for help on weird mail munching bugs and you'll get an idea that it's still not yet as good as advertised a decade ago.
As to why it's never going to happen, you are asking to hit an obscured hidden target in a moving pile of spaghetti. A "feature" of MS Exchange is MS Office integration and MS Office integration only, and every time something else works with it a "fix" comes out to stop it.
As for thinking MS Outlook is good, do you actually believe that? I'm a *nix admin but I've wasted vast amounts of time helping out when the MS Windows people didn't have enough manpower to solve problems with corrupted mailboxes, virus infection and all the trouble that comes from using the throwaway free gift with MS Office which is Outlook.
I Agree - Zimbra Does This TODAY (Score:5, Interesting)
I Agree and Zimbra Does This TODAY.
Here's a comparison between Zimbra from a few yrs ago to MS-Exchange:
http://www.slideshare.net/agileware/zimbra-collaboration-suite-vs-microsoft-exchange-2008 [slideshare.net]
We deployed Zimbra a few years ago because we needed enterprise calendaring. You know - seeing other people's calendars and setting up shared calendars for a group. We aren't a Microsoft-shop.
Zimbra made all that easy.
For a long time, using the calendar meant having to use the zimbra web-client or a java-based thick-client. That changed about a year ago when Thunderbird+Lightning finally started working with calendars properly.
Since June-ish, I haven't used the Zimbra web-client at all.
When MS-Office switched to the Ribbon, people my age with 15 yrs using the old menus were thrown for a loop. At that point, I dumped MS-Office and haven't looked back. The only Office-like tool I still use is Visio. There isn't any substitute for that and I don't see one on the way either.
Because I work in a smaller company now, we've switched to web-apps for every corporate app that we could. This means we don't mandate any specific desktop and encourage departments to use what works for them and their budgets. More and more are deploying Linux-based desktops AND solving real problems with it. I doubt it will ever completely replace Ms-Windows here. Some things just aren't possible with Linux, but we provide terminal servers for those groups. Business productivity software works great over the LAN using RDP - when and if it is necessary. Not having to deal with AV and viruses on the desktops constantly has this CIO happier. When a virus does hit here, it is on a server or a printer, not most desktops.
I know this method can't work for everyone inside every company. Heck, we can't do it for ours 100% either.
Zimbra has freed us from the MS-Koolaid. If you run Exchange, you must run AD ... DHCP, DNS and buy CALs from MS. Then MS-SQL becomes required and all the MS-Windows Server licenses ... sure, all these things are integrated but they are a bear to upgrade - at least MS-Exchange is. Exchange is the linchpin - Zimbra removes it.
Younger users - those in their 20s are used to integrated webmail+webcal+webIM+webdocs. It isn't a big leap for them to use Zimbra.
As a replacement for Sharepoint, we use Alfresco. It isn't perfect, but the price is right. Did you know that whitehouse.gov uses a Drupal front-end connected to an Alfesco back-end?
Costs for acquisition and support for both Zimbra and Alfresco are much less than the Microsoft options overall while providing competitive features. It is definitely worth a look.