[ANSWERED]libreoffice or onlyoffice?

t0mri@lemmy.ml to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 37 points –

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Company computing assets are managed. One normally doesn't get to override IT policy without business justification.

Its not hard to justify giving everyone free cross-platform office suite at work lol

It is when your business relies on Microsoft services which are inherently incompatible with LO

That's a huge bill for a business, and businesses are always looking to cut expenses. Again, its an easy sell

What happens when you need to collaborate with other businesses who use O365? The business would also have to spend time updating any legacy documents, templates, spreadsheets and so on. Then you have the IT teams, who will need extensive training so that they can field the inevitable flurry of support tickets and calls. And that's not getting into the support side of things - who do I go to if something breaks in LibreOffice?

I am an advocate for OSS, but there is a bigger picture here, and unfortunately it's not always as simple as just switching over. I wish it was, believe me!

Tell the other business to use LO. Shouldn't be an issue because its free and runs on every platform.

Y'know, this conversation doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so I will leave it here: if it's such an easy sell, every business in the world would have done it by now.

It became the default in every business I ever worked at. If that's not the case where you are, perhaps you should look into a mirror and ask why?

If that's your view of it, then you truly do not understand how businesses operate (especially larger companies). "Hey this is free, let's switch to this!" isn't a pitch. There are so many factors to consider: service, support, contracts, deployment, on and on and on. It would be great if every business adopted OSS, but they're not going to. And that's not a failure of one employee to convince a Fortune 500 company, for example, that LO would be a cost-saving measure.

Call Microsoft about a bug and tell me how well their support works for you. Theres zero benefits to going with MS and a thousand for going with libre

The point is that those "thousand" benefits for LO do not matter. That's simply not how businesses run. It would be great if it were, but it isn't. And your experience as an individual user with MS support is completely irrelevant with regard to business support.

Call Microsoft about a bug and tell me how well their support works for you.

Pretty well, actually.

Microsoft has some of the best technical support I've ever dealt with TBH. Meanwhile with LibreOffice your technical support is mostly forum diving yourself. If you have a big, competent, it department, maybe that's a feasible thing, but I've never worked anywhere with that kind of capacity

I reported a SharePoint bug to Microsoft yesterday afternoon, and it was fixed by the time I logged in this morning.

Not when you're already on an annual contract with Microsoft and the majority of your company's employees are nontechnical

Yes. We're talking about Libre Office here. Its a very mature and accessible app. Not something that requires technical knowledge.

And, yes, if you're on an annual contract then its even easier to convince management to cancel it for all users by default (with some exceptions as needed). Lots of money to be saved.