SUSE's LibreOffice Core Team Moves To Collabora 72
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Meeks has announced that the core of SUSE's LibreOffice team is moving over to Collabora, which will now be providing commercial LibreOffice support. 'It seems to me that the ability to say "no" to profitable but peripheral business in order to strategically focus the company is a really important management task. In the final analysis I'm convinced that this is the right business decision for SUSE. It will allow Collabora's Productivity division to focus exclusively on driving LibreOffice into Windows, Mac and Consulting markets that are peripheral to SUSE. It will also retain the core of the existing skill base for the benefit of SUSE's customers, and the wider LibreOffice community, of which openSUSE is an important part.'"
open source office suite will never succeed (Score:0, Insightful)
without a robust mail and calendaring client that can co-exist in a microsoft exchange environment (even with full and absolute 100% compatibility and feature match with other office components)... and preferably with a true drop-in replacement for exchange server. exchange is the driving force behind most major deployments of microsoft office and windows server products. because of that large, captive user base, it will remain the de facto standard in business, even among those who don't use exchange for mail or calendaring. libreoffice, openoffice, gnumeric, abiword, and all the other open source alternatives to some (never all) microsoft office components will NEVER be more than a niche product with an insignificant (by comparison) number of users.
google is the main threat to the microsoft office ecosystem... why? because it has mail and calendaring in addition to alternatives to the most-used office components. the open source stuff doesn't. businesses aren't going to piece together a mess of open source products to kinda sorta, maybe get most the features of exchange and exchange server -- and then trust it to run reliably.. they'll pay the microsoft tax and get it all in one place because they're dumb sheep, and 20+ years of following microsoft is a hard habit to break... even if maybe, with the right person in charge of deployment and administration, it might just be the same or less cost overall. google offers a similar one-stop shopping experience but is new and has its own issues such as publicized outages and break-ins, government snooping, questionable data retention/usage, etc.
hate on this post all you want.. but facts are facts. microsoft is king of the enterprise, and ain't goin anywhere anytime soon.
Re:Not A Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
"drop-in" != "figuring out how" (Score:3, Insightful)
"DROP IN" means there's a readily available "Downloads" page at some website, where you go to download some 250MB executable file with a free 2-user licence, and once you download that file, you double click on it, and it brings up a choice panel between "Basic" and "Advanced" installation, and 99% of all n00b users can choose the "Basic" installation, and within 5 minutes or so, you're up and playing around with the system and getting a feel for how it works and how your users could benefit from switching to the system.
"Drop-In" does NOT mean that you have to spend a week at Amazon, reading through thousands of product reviews, deciding which stack of softcover programming books with pictures of bizarre esoteric mammals on their covers you will need to purchase, and then spending about three or four years of your life actually reading the stack of softcover programming books with pictures of bizarre esoteric mammals on their covers, until you have a PhD-level understanding of C-Compilers [and a worthwhile opinion as to whether you should compile with the GNU compiler or Clang/LLVM or the Intel compiler or the M$FT compiler or the WTFE compiler], and which libraries you will need to compile against, and the theory of BASH shells, and the theory of prime numbers & elliptic curves and LDAP authentication, and the theory of sector-level hard-drive replication living beneath WebDAV and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And then five or ten years later, when you've finally earned your "PhD" from the "School of Hard Knocks", you've still got to spend six or eight weeks at various internet forums, from Palo Alto to Bangalore, trying to figure out WTF line of code you need to add to some configuration file to get it all to work together reasonably "seamlessly", when finally some poor fat bearded dude, working for free from his mother's basement in Bulgaria, finally points out to you that your corporation can't do this because your 1,000 client computers have a known "issue" involving their 3Com ethernet chipsets in combination with their ATi graphics chipsets, but that no one has been able to chase down where that particular bug might live in the total code package, and so you're SOL.
At which point you learn that no one ever got fired for purchasing M$FT.