[board-discuss] MC Chairperson
Dear BoD It is my pleasure to inform you that the Membership Committee as elected Andre Schnabel as its Chairperson. Regards Norbert Thiebaud -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to board-discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Is Microsoft getting worried about free Office suites?
Olav Dahlum wrote: On 28/11/11 13:13, Pedro wrote: Ian Lynch wrote Google should do a version of Office based on the OOo/LibO code base and embed ads and search links, make it available freely and brand it Google Office. Given their brand strength and marketing, that would probably do more to frighten MS than anything we can do. Slightly surprised they haven't already done it. Interesting concept. But I think they are investing a lot on the "Cloud" with the Chrome Book laptops that investing time on an offline suite doesn't make much sense... In the same line of thought: Google Docs is fine in the "Developed" countries where working in the "Cloud" is a reality. This is not so for more than 2/3 of the world's population (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) I do believe that currently LibreOffice is the leading alternative to MS Office (but would love to see some numbers :) ) Just a couple of observations here. First, most businesses do not and probably will not in the near future, go to cloud computing. there are several reasons for this, foremost, security. Companies do not want important documents with proprietary information flying back and forth on the internet where they could be intercepted. Second, reliability. Remote servers and the infrastructure between local computers and them have been known to go down. Most companies don't want to have to rely on vulnerable remote connections. Another thing, most companies would like to own the resources that they depend on for day to day operation. I hear a lot of people talking about how tablets are taking over, but somehow I just don't see a corporate steno pool using tablets or smartphones to produce their important documents. Desktop (tower case) computers will continue to dominate all serious corporate computing applications. That means MS Office or suitable substitutes will continue to be the most important applications in the business world. The biggest reason, as far as I can see it that MS Office will continue to dominate is not because of file format tie up, at least not from 2014 on, but because of quality shortcomings in all competing products. Face it, LibreOffice Writer doesn't have anywhere near as good a spell check function as Word does. Writer's spell check dictionary is woefully short of compound words. Writer doesn't have a good grammar checker function built in. Also Writer is very much lacking in templates and clip art compared to Word. Now home users and students might well overlook these shortcomings because of the rather large difference in the cost to obtain the software, but businesses, never. Now these things can be fixed, and many of them won't even require a lot of effort from our developers. Many of us users who may have added thousands of words to our spell check dictionaries could contribute them to the project if some developers showed us how. Also, the auto correct function as it currently exists can be turned into a fairly good grammar correcter by simply adding a lot of functions to it using its current customization capabilities. I have made mine able to automatically capitalize all the days of the week, all months except March and May, since these two also exist as other words. The program can be trained to capitalize most proper nouns, to correct most common typos, etc. With a little more effort in such areas we can bring Writer much closer to the basic quality of Word. I never use spreadsheets, so I really can't comment on any shortcomings of Calc. But I do know that a word processor is the core of any office suite. If some of the developers will help me and a few other users who might volunteer to help with some of these things, that don't actually require the specific skills of a programmer/developer, I think that we could do a lot to make LibreOffice a much better office suite, in particular much better than OOo was at the point of the fork. I know that the developers have done much to improve the code base, but I am sure that some of us non developers could also help to improve the useability of the suite. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] overall communication guidelines and reply-to mangling
Hi Michael,
Michael Meeks schrieb:
Hi guys,
On Fri, 2011-11-25 at 22:19 +0100, Stefan Weigel wrote:
From my point of view, the mailing list is the sender.
When I hit the "Reply" button, this has to go back to the sender,
who sent that to me, which is the mailing list and not Regina.
Sure sure. But you must get mail every day that is CC'd to several
people. Surely you get to understand the difference between "Reply" and
"Reply to all" ? the latter will keep the CC.
At the end of the day, IMHO all this comes down to a simple choice:
* make it easy for established list users to avoid having to
think whom they want to reply to, and needing to press
ctrl-shift-r vs. ctrl-r (or whatever)
or
* make it easy for new and peripherally involved users to get
replies to their casual E-mails without doing a long list of
operations.
Where by a long list of operations, I mean, that in order to get a
reply to your mail/question, first you need to:
a) be clueful and know you havn't a chance of getting a reply
b) send a mail to subscribe-foo@a.b.c
c) wait for the reply
d) confirm acceptance of mailing list
e) while (time< max_time_wait_for_any_reply) {
f) recieve mail, delete uninteresting messages
g) read& respond to tiny minority of messages that
are a reply to your query.
h) } send a mail to unsuscribe-foo@a.b.c
i) confirm un-subscribe from unsubscribe-foo@a.b.c
In my view, most people fall down at a) - they just never appear to get
a reply to their message. To ask someone to do steps b->i in order to
interact with us is one that strangles community IMHO.
I see no problem for this steps. That has worked all the time for our
German OOo-lists, so why shouldn't it work for an international list?
Users get a reply from the list moderator which describes what to do.
Those with support requests who do not like mailing lists, will use a
forum. If someone really wants to participate regularly, he needs to
subscribe anyway.
Kind regards
Regina
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Re: [tdf-discuss] overall communication guidelines and reply-to mangling
Hi guys,
On Fri, 2011-11-25 at 22:19 +0100, Stefan Weigel wrote:
> From my point of view, the mailing list is the sender.
> When I hit the "Reply" button, this has to go back to the sender,
> who sent that to me, which is the mailing list and not Regina.
Sure sure. But you must get mail every day that is CC'd to several
people. Surely you get to understand the difference between "Reply" and
"Reply to all" ? the latter will keep the CC.
At the end of the day, IMHO all this comes down to a simple choice:
* make it easy for established list users to avoid having to
think whom they want to reply to, and needing to press
ctrl-shift-r vs. ctrl-r (or whatever)
or
* make it easy for new and peripherally involved users to get
replies to their casual E-mails without doing a long list of
operations.
Where by a long list of operations, I mean, that in order to get a
reply to your mail/question, first you need to:
a) be clueful and know you havn't a chance of getting a reply
b) send a mail to subscribe-foo@a.b.c
c) wait for the reply
d) confirm acceptance of mailing list
e) while (time < max_time_wait_for_any_reply) {
f) recieve mail, delete uninteresting messages
g) read & respond to tiny minority of messages that
are a reply to your query.
h) } send a mail to unsuscribe-foo@a.b.c
i) confirm un-subscribe from unsubscribe-foo@a.b.c
In my view, most people fall down at a) - they just never appear to get
a reply to their message. To ask someone to do steps b->i in order to
interact with us is one that strangles community IMHO.
HTH,
Michael.
--
michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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Re: [tdf-discuss] overall communication guidelines and reply-to mangling
Hi Friedrich, On Wed, 2011-11-23 at 23:45 +0100, Friedrich Strohmaier wrote: > After getting reports about serious issues hindering efficient mail > communication through the recent practiced "reply-to mangling" on our > mailing lists, we from tech team are going for a test setup, switching > it off for one - most likely this one. Cool ! :-) having said that, I'd prefer it to be tried on a less high-volume list, where we could see the utility of attracting more participants (personally). To me a huge benefit of not reply-to mangling is to allow new people to interact with the list (and get replies to their mail) without being subscribed; that provides an easy on-ramp into the project, and hopefully helps increase contribution: giving our community fuzzy edges. Of course, I would expect it to be opposed by people who are already members of a given community, and like not getting personal replies to messages in threads they start. > I thought about to advance Italo's great compilation of posting style > guidelines http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette towards a > "7 golden rules making it a pleasure to read your mail" style guideline > flanked by an "adopter's" page where people can out themselves as > adopters and supporters of that guidelines. Sounds rather lovely; making mails shorter, sweeter and easier to read by others (by snipping context, not top-posting etc.) is just basic politeness IMHO. Great to see Italo wrote that up. HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Is Microsoft getting worried about free Office suites?
On 28/11/11 13:13, Pedro wrote: > > Ian Lynch wrote >> >> Google should do a version of Office based on the >> OOo/LibO code base and embed ads and search links, make it available >> freely >> and brand it Google Office. Given their brand strength and marketing, >> that >> would probably do more to frighten MS than anything we can do. Slightly >> surprised they haven't already done it. >> > > Interesting concept. But I think they are investing a lot on the "Cloud" > with the Chrome Book laptops that investing time on an offline suite doesn't > make much sense... > > In the same line of thought: Google Docs is fine in the "Developed" > countries where working in the "Cloud" is a reality. This is not so for more > than 2/3 of the world's population > (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) > > I do believe that currently LibreOffice is the leading alternative to MS > Office (but would love to see some numbers :) ) > Well, not specific to LibreOffice, but take a look at some of the documents I've compiled: http://login.kristshell.net/~olorin/Dokumenter/ – Olav -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Is Microsoft getting worried about free Office suites?
> > I do believe that currently LibreOffice is the leading alternative to MS > > Office (but would love to see some numbers :) ) > It certainly is on Linux. On Windows I'm not sure. On the Cloud, its > Google. That is why MS is looking at new ways of gaining income. LibreOffice on Windows suffers from a lower awareness than OOo, which is still leading (although fading away for a number of reasons). Based on the OOo experience, it will take another two years to get enough traction to have an impact on Windows end user adoptions, while - on the contrary - enterprise deployments are already increasing in most geographies. Microsoft is losing the file format lock in, and is trying to find other ways to keep users connected. Of course, the high upfront cost of the Office license is a barrier to upgrades and first time adoptions, and they are trying to get around it. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Is Microsoft getting worried about free Office suites?
On 28 November 2011 12:13, Pedro wrote: > > Ian Lynch wrote > > > > Google should do a version of Office based on the > > OOo/LibO code base and embed ads and search links, make it available > > freely > > and brand it Google Office. Given their brand strength and marketing, > > that > > would probably do more to frighten MS than anything we can do. Slightly > > surprised they haven't already done it. > > > > Interesting concept. But I think they are investing a lot on the "Cloud" > with the Chrome Book laptops that investing time on an offline suite > doesn't > make much sense... > It might if it makes money for them :-) > In the same line of thought: Google Docs is fine in the "Developed" > countries where working in the "Cloud" is a reality. This is not so for > more > than 2/3 of the world's population > (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) > Except that access to broad band is increasing with Africa having the highest rate of increase in access to mobile telephones. Cloud has the potential to radically reduce costs of education in the developing world. We recently did a trial of the INGOTs in Kenya with satellite links and bussing computers to schools often with no electricity. Basically it worked and the potential savings in paper and books alone could pay for a broadband connection. When mobile computing devices get below $100 the entire economics of the developing world will change. Of course a lot of second hand hardware will find its way out there and I doubt any of these will pay 10s of dollars, never mind 100s for MS Office on them. > > I do believe that currently LibreOffice is the leading alternative to MS > Office (but would love to see some numbers :) ) > It certainly is on Linux. On Windows I'm not sure. On the Cloud, its Google. That is why MS is looking at new ways of gaining income. > > -- > View this message in context: > http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Is-Microsoft-getting-worried-about-free-Office-suites-tp3541925p3542033.html > Sent from the Discuss mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > -- > Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org > Problems? > http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ > Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette > List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ > All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be > deleted > > -- Ian Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications (The Schools ITQ) www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940 The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Re: Is Microsoft getting worried about free Office suites?
Ian Lynch wrote > > Google should do a version of Office based on the > OOo/LibO code base and embed ads and search links, make it available > freely > and brand it Google Office. Given their brand strength and marketing, > that > would probably do more to frighten MS than anything we can do. Slightly > surprised they haven't already done it. > Interesting concept. But I think they are investing a lot on the "Cloud" with the Chrome Book laptops that investing time on an offline suite doesn't make much sense... In the same line of thought: Google Docs is fine in the "Developed" countries where working in the "Cloud" is a reality. This is not so for more than 2/3 of the world's population (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) I do believe that currently LibreOffice is the leading alternative to MS Office (but would love to see some numbers :) ) -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Is-Microsoft-getting-worried-about-free-Office-suites-tp3541925p3542033.html Sent from the Discuss mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Is Microsoft getting worried about free Office suites?
On 28 November 2011 11:14, Pedro wrote: > I'm wondering if the recent offer for download of the "add supported" > limited > edition of Microsoft Office Starter is a reaction to the improving quality > and dynamics of several free Office suites (with LibreOffice leading the > pack) Possibly Google Docs leading the pack ;-). I use both LibO and Google Docs, but probably slightly more Google these days. or if this is simply a strategy of giving something for free to get > people to buy new hardware in the Spending Season? > > I know it may sound absurd but since Office Starter is for Windows Vista > and > 7 only, some people might consider buying the new machine (the marketing > people convinced they need) just to take advantage of this freebee :) > Thoughts? > I'd say it is probably an experiment to see what revenue could be generated from ads, given that increasingly people expect to get software gratis and without the hassle of license fees. That seems to me more likely to be related to the influence of the internet than desktop apps. They need to consider alternative revenue models to compete with Google's search and advertising model. Google should do a version of Office based on the OOo/LibO code base and embed ads and search links, make it available freely and brand it Google Office. Given their brand strength and marketing, that would probably do more to frighten MS than anything we can do. Slightly surprised they haven't already done it. -- Ian Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications (The Schools ITQ) www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940 The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Is Microsoft getting worried about free Office suites?
I'm wondering if the recent offer for download of the "add supported" limited edition of Microsoft Office Starter is a reaction to the improving quality and dynamics of several free Office suites (with LibreOffice leading the pack) or if this is simply a strategy of giving something for free to get people to buy new hardware in the Spending Season? I know it may sound absurd but since Office Starter is for Windows Vista and 7 only, some people might consider buying the new machine (the marketing people convinced they need) just to take advantage of this freebee :) Thoughts? -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Is-Microsoft-getting-worried-about-free-Office-suites-tp3541925p3541925.html Sent from the Discuss mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
