Hi, Paul,

IMHO, from one side Xoffice - great tool, from other - it's almost useless:
- MS Word is not the only editor in the PC world
- MS Word is relatively "heavy" application. 
- Installation process is far from seamless - huge headache for people  "who 
have almost no free time and are not interested in
 learning yet another program". They will have to spend 10 times more time on 
installing it, than on mastering WYSIWYG editor. Just try it on 10 users, you 
will see the difference :-)
- Localization (here I mean cyrillic names)

Much more versatile tool - web browser.

" Everyone we talked to about editing a wiki document via the web interface
 was simply not interested."

When human has choice to learn or skip learning with the same final result, 
usually choice is obvious. Nobody ever will find browser more useful, then MS 
Word, until you will close MS Word option forever.  That's human. Meanwhile 
each and every user wil find it more useful for them, then "old-styled-word" 
editing. So, in this case - CHOICE is bad thing to move forward. Try it on 
regular users and you will feel it yourself.

Last century people mastered MS Word, this century people found it 
extrafeatured, simplified as much as possible editing process and made 
wiki-cloud based systems default  for document workflow.
So, for more or less big projects: Windows and Word purchase looks insane 
versus open source OS + web browser. As I understand, it's the only reason, why 
other project do not such tools (like XOffice).  I do have MS Word on my 
Windows 7 machine, but I don't remember when I used it last time to EDIT 
documents.  ;)

 As for me, XWiki has one of the best in class web-based WISIWYG editor and all 
known for me users found it easy to use: NO NEED to dig into XWiki Syntax AT 
ALL. Just try other solutions to compare.

"The killer feature is that normal users can create a document and copy-paste 
screenshots into a wiki document."

This really has sence to implement into WISYWIG editor, but don't think it's a 
primary necessity. For me, for example, more critical - less complicated 
mechanism of anchor management.

Probably, these reasons are slowly pushing Xoffice aside of mainstream.

Kind regards.

Dmitry Bakbardin



24 октября 2011, 18:36 от Paul Harris <harris...@gmail.com>:
> The killer feature is that normal users can create a document and copy-paste
> screenshots into a wiki document.
> That cannot be done with (almost) any web wiki editor I can find at present.
> 
> Every person we showed it to loved it, and was willing to try editing a
> document on the wiki.
> Everyone we talked to about editing a wiki document via the web interface
> was simply not interested.
> We work with people who have almost no free time and are not interested in
> learning yet another program (ie web-wiki)... They know MS Word well, they
> are already read to write content.
> 
> I don't understand why you aren't pushing this simple but powerful component
> more.  I don't see it mentioned on wikipedia, or wikimatrix.
> I think if you made sure xoffice worked, and let people know it existed,
> then more people would use xwiki.  Its a killer feature and I don't
> understand why its not on billboards on the sides of freeways.
> 
> Regards,
> Paul
> 
> On 24 October 2011 20:35, Florin Ciubotaru <florin.ciubot...@xwiki.com>wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > If you didn't start your documentation yet and you don't have any legacy
> > documents, I'd recommend using a pure web solution like XWiki. If you use
> > MS
> > Office for advanced content, you will have issues pushing that content to
> > the wiki anyway.
> > I created XOffice a few years ago, when MS Office was a lot more dominant
> > and web editors were still weak(including the one used by XWiki), but the
> > situation is quite different now.
> >
> > Indeed there was no development on it for the past year.
> > If you have critical issues with XOffice, it may be one of the following:
> > - you are using a localized version of Office or Windows (there are older
> > known issues with those)
> > - there is a conflict with newer XWiki versions.
> >
> > The MS Office and Windows behavior and security settings are different for
> > versions released on other languages. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but
> > that's the way it is.
> > I've been receiving quite a few requests for a new release. However I could
> > only do some bug fixing only for the En/En environment, since it's a pain
> > to
> > test and fix other versions.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Florin Ciubotau
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Vincent Massol <vinc...@massol.net>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Paul,
> > >
> > > Indeed nobody is actively working on it at the moment and I was about to
> > > send a mail this week to propose to retire it and move it to the contrib
> > > repository since nobody in the xwiki committers are active on it and we
> > want
> > > to keep a good quality on the software that we make available.
> > >
> > > The only alternative would be someone stepping up and willing to work on
> > it
> > > and ensure it works with latest XWiki Enterprise versions.  See that we
> > have
> > > nobody active on it, we could throw a vote to grandfather that person as
> > an
> > > XOffice committer so that he/she can easily work on it.
> > >
> > > Since you already fixed some bugs on it maybe you'd be interested to help
> > > out?
> > >
> > > Thanks a lot
> > > -Vincent
> > >
> > > On Oct 24, 2011, at 6:10 AM, Paul Harris wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > I personally fixed a few bugs in xoffice at the start of the year,
> > which
> > > was
> > > > released in XOffice 1.1.  That was a long time ago, and we have not
> > been
> > > > using xoffice in the meantime (not building documentation yet).  Now it
> > > is
> > > > time to use it, and I'm having a lot of trouble.
> > > >
> > > > I would post a bug to JIRA if it were a single problem, but it appears
> > > that
> > > > xoffice is fundamentally broken as I can't go longer than 30 seconds
> > > without
> > > > hitting a road block.
> > > > Does anyone use it?
> > > >
> > > > * For some pages with images, when I click Edit, the text appears with
> > > blank
> > > > boxes for the images.
> > > >
> > > > * I am able to do the following: I edit a text-only page, and
> > copy-paste
> > > in
> > > > an image, then click Publish.  Stop and restart Word, and it is able to
> > > Edit
> > > > the page WITH THE IMAGE correctly.  Seems strange that it works for
> > this
> > > > page, but not the other.
> > > >
> > > > * Some pages cannot be edited.  I click Edit and it either doesn't seem
> > > to
> > > > hear the button click, OR it will pop up "Opening page..." progress
> > > dialog,
> > > > which never disappears.
> > > >
> > > > These are serious roadblock bugs, am I the only one seeing this, or is
> > > this
> > > > so buggy that noone else is using it regularly?
> > > >
> > > > This is version 1.1 (released early 2011), with Word 2010, on Vista,
> > > freshly
> > > > installed with not much else on the laptop.
> > > >
> > > > thanks
> > > > Paul
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > users mailing list
> > > users@xwiki.org
> > > http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > users@xwiki.org
> > http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
> >
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