<story><title>LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365</title><url>http://www.infoworld.com/article/3014654/open-source-tools/libreoffice-as-a-service-offers-alternative-to-google-docs-office-365.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pidg</author><text>+1 for Office 365. I wasn&amp;#x27;t convinced until I actually started working at a company that uses it properly. The collaboration features in the native desktop apps work beautifully.&lt;p&gt;Not having to endure emailed-round documents with multiple competing versions like &amp;quot;Report-Dec2015 Draft v5(FP,PL,KM) (2).doc&amp;quot; is worth the price of entry alone.&lt;p&gt;I feel sorry for those like the UK government who&amp;#x27;ve been successfully lobbied by The Document Foundation into using open standards, and are now locked in to using one vendor - Collabora - and their proprietary fork of LibreOffice.</text></item><item><author>DiabloD3</author><text>To those claiming that Office 365 somehow promotes web apps as your real apps... that isn&amp;#x27;t entirely true.&lt;p&gt;My company (the one I started, hi) uses Office 365, and all three of us use Office 365&amp;#x27;s full office suite, the actual real desktop app one.&lt;p&gt;What we use Office 365&amp;#x27;s cloud stuff for is their Exchange cluster (oh God, so delicious), and for OneDrive for Business (ie, what used to be Sharepoint).&lt;p&gt;Browsers just aren&amp;#x27;t fast enough to handle web apps that large (not picking on Office 365&amp;#x27;s web apps, anything that big just sorta murders browsers), and I don&amp;#x27;t think they ever will be. This isn&amp;#x27;t something you can solve when your only tools are HTML, CSS, and JS.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Majestic121</author><text>Are you seriously using the &amp;quot;lock in&amp;quot; argument &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; open standards? Is this a joke?&lt;p&gt;You could not be more locked in than when using the Office 365 suite. It may happen to have some nice feature for now, but there is nothing keeping them from pulling an IE all over again, and you will be completely locked in because of the proprietary format used.</text></comment>
<story><title>LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365</title><url>http://www.infoworld.com/article/3014654/open-source-tools/libreoffice-as-a-service-offers-alternative-to-google-docs-office-365.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pidg</author><text>+1 for Office 365. I wasn&amp;#x27;t convinced until I actually started working at a company that uses it properly. The collaboration features in the native desktop apps work beautifully.&lt;p&gt;Not having to endure emailed-round documents with multiple competing versions like &amp;quot;Report-Dec2015 Draft v5(FP,PL,KM) (2).doc&amp;quot; is worth the price of entry alone.&lt;p&gt;I feel sorry for those like the UK government who&amp;#x27;ve been successfully lobbied by The Document Foundation into using open standards, and are now locked in to using one vendor - Collabora - and their proprietary fork of LibreOffice.</text></item><item><author>DiabloD3</author><text>To those claiming that Office 365 somehow promotes web apps as your real apps... that isn&amp;#x27;t entirely true.&lt;p&gt;My company (the one I started, hi) uses Office 365, and all three of us use Office 365&amp;#x27;s full office suite, the actual real desktop app one.&lt;p&gt;What we use Office 365&amp;#x27;s cloud stuff for is their Exchange cluster (oh God, so delicious), and for OneDrive for Business (ie, what used to be Sharepoint).&lt;p&gt;Browsers just aren&amp;#x27;t fast enough to handle web apps that large (not picking on Office 365&amp;#x27;s web apps, anything that big just sorta murders browsers), and I don&amp;#x27;t think they ever will be. This isn&amp;#x27;t something you can solve when your only tools are HTML, CSS, and JS.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chmars</author><text>Which collaboration features?&lt;p&gt;(Seriously: We use desktop versions of Office apps based on Office 365 but I have not discovered any collaboration features so far. Where are they hidden? Are they compliant with European data privacy and labor law?)</text></comment>