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.'"
Re:Nasty doc recovery bug fixed? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a bit skeptical of ms office's greatness too. My company and I do support and having been the one to get the company off the ground I did a lot of it until a few years ago. My recollection is people fear stuff that is different, but in reality MS Office requires significantly more maintenance. There are lots of bugs in it. For instance I had a employee (way overqualified and extremely knowledgeable all around) spend 3-4 days on one customs outlet because of a bug. The most recent MS Outlook was doing something much worse than the auto-recovery bug this person speaks of. Had my tech not done the smart thing and backed everything outlook related up before he upgraded the customer would have been screwed. If you wonder why it took so long too- it's a business customer who lives off email.
Now I had another similar customer a few years back. Same thing happened. The difference is I didn't waste 3-4 days. I hack'd it and the hack involved gmail. Turned out gmail does everything most people really need and was a much better solution than Outlook. It was pretty hilarious. There is this fear that only Outlook / microsoft Office can do what you need it to. It's just not the case though.
And personally I've only ever run this business (substantial size now; 5 years and many employees) off GNU/Linux, Thunderbird/Evolution, and LibreOffice. Ohh we do have imap setup and webmail. Nothing is even outsourced (well, I do use gmail for contacts/calendar actually although we are going to eliminate that shortly).
While we started off doing support for mostly MS Windows users about 90% of our business is now GNU/Linux and it in part due to people purchasing our solutions. The other part is an increase in customers simply going GNU/Linux on there own initiative. About 50% of non-technical local customers who were on MS Windows when they started with us have gone GNU/Linux. It could be 80% if we had a solution for quickbooks.