Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
This is a huge part of why you see it as not working. You aren't trying to change your ecosystem, you are trying to use LibreOffice as MS Office, rather than using it apples to apples. Try using MS Office to read LibreOffice files, it's not good either.
Actually switch to LibreOffice, don't go halfway, and you'll be amazed at how totally great it is.Until someone outside of the company sends you a file. You can't say that exclusively using ODF files or even writing xlsx/docx files with libreoffice fixes the issue. Sure maybe for the random spreadsheet or word document you'r eusing internally. But business rely on external information. A lot of that comes in the form of office documents.
We get this all the time, and it makes no difference. Seeing someone's "should have been a PDF but they dont' understand file formats" Word doc with slightly different formatting doesn't impact anyone. And if people are randomly sending Word files back and forth, we address the misuse of technology rather than spending lots of money to give them the right tools to the wrong job.
Are there times you HAVE to work with editable files with outside firms? Sure. Rare, but they certainly happen (but it's certainly not the standard use case.) Are there times when those companies absolutely refuse to not use MS Office file formats, yes. Of those two filtered situations, you still have two options... one is to have MS Office in isolated cases where needed for that use case; or just accept slightly different formatting.
It's not like LibreOffice doesn't do a job well enough that most users don't even notice until someone is doing an arbitrary side by side formatting comparison.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Your second point now I really don't believe because you can't just "use a start menu or desktop icons". You need extensions enabled for that (unless you're using some other distro but you mentioned just Ubuntu). The extensions break frequently between releases. And are nowhere near what people would used to seeing anyway.
Just works "out of the box". For real. No extensions, no extra work. We use it every day, both at customers and internally. It's actually that simple. We can give it to people with zero training or knowledge of Linux, they don't need any training, at all. Anyone who can actually be functional on Windows can use it without the slightest issue.
We also use Raspberry Pi OS sometimes. But Ubuntu mostly.
The icons on the side are a bit different, but it takes moments to get used to that. I'd prefer Cinnamon for that sometimes, but as people move away from apps to just using the browser, it becomes less and less of an issue.
Ok. How many workstations is NTG managing?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
I have spent so much time trying to get LibreOffice to work or read MS office documents (that everyone else uses), and there has been nothing but issues.
This is a huge part of why you see it as not working. You aren't trying to change your ecosystem, you are trying to use LibreOffice as MS Office, rather than using it apples to apples. Try using MS Office to read LibreOffice files, it's not good either.
Actually switch to LibreOffice, don't go halfway, and you'll be amazed at how totally great it is. As powerful? No, MS Office is the best when it comes to total features. But the average company has literally zero people who use those high end features, and those that do use them it's generally extremely isolated people within an org. No "normal" office worker can even start to touch the power features of either platform. For normal workers, meaning the 95%, not the 80%, both do anything that they need.
The problem is that you cannot force people outside your org to use LibreOffice, and even forcing people inside your org to use something far inferior is extremely difficult.
Another issue that you didnt mention with LibreOffice, is the lack of collaboration when working on shared documents. I can much easier collaborate and work simultaneously on MS document.
Can you save a few bucks a month per user using LibreOffice, sure? It will cost you more support hours and you will get less productivity. So you will lose money to use a far inferior product, not to mention that you cannot easily share documents outside your org. As you mentioned, LibreOffice and MS Office have compatibility issues and the rest of the world uses MS Office. So prepare for issues every time you deal with someone outside your org (which is daily, obviously)
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Your second point now I really don't believe because you can't just "use a start menu or desktop icons". You need extensions enabled for that (unless you're using some other distro but you mentioned just Ubuntu). The extensions break frequently between releases. And are nowhere near what people would used to seeing anyway.
Just works "out of the box". For real. No extensions, no extra work. We use it every day, both at customers and internally. It's actually that simple. We can give it to people with zero training or knowledge of Linux, they don't need any training, at all. Anyone who can actually be functional on Windows can use it without the slightest issue.
We also use Raspberry Pi OS sometimes. But Ubuntu mostly.
The icons on the side are a bit different, but it takes moments to get used to that. I'd prefer Cinnamon for that sometimes, but as people move away from apps to just using the browser, it becomes less and less of an issue.
Ok. How many workstations is NTG managing?
Thousands, in many different environments. So it's many hundreds of different scenarios. So we see a fair number of workstations, with hundreds of different business and environmental scenarios.
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
I honestly don't know how you can say that with a straight face. I love open source stuff and use it when I can, but there is no chance that the random office worker is going to have vastly less issues with Ubuntu and LibreOffice.
In the real world, working with small businesses, it's dramatic how many fewer issues we see. That's why flat rate support for Linux systems is lower, it takes so much less IT time to buy, license, install, and support. And I don't mean a "little" less, it's so much less.
Random office workers are a great example. They rarely do anything complicated and all they tend to need are their business LOB apps (they can't tell if they are on Windows or Ubuntu), web browser, and/or office tools. Often, people are switching on their own these days and don't even realize because they've already adapted to all web work. That's why we are finding Chromebooks in customer sites all the time, because they work and the customers don't even reach out to IT before deploying and people just adapt transparently.
Since end users don't interact with the OS in any meaningful way, most aren't completely clear that the OS has even changed. They use a start menu, desktop icons, or whatever to launch their apps and it's all transparent.
Linux is great, LibreOffice is garbage.
I've seen LibreOffice Calc handle huge spreadsheets (thousands of lines) fine, and then choke on smaller ones. I'm not sure what the defining factor is lol.
LibreOffice is :pile_of_poo:
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
The problem is that you cannot force people outside your org to use LibreOffice, and even forcing people inside your org to use something far inferior is extremely difficult.
But the assumption is that people outside of your org can force you to use MS Office.
It's a two way street. Except one way is asking someone else to do something for free. The other is asking you to donate IT time managing and money to Microsoft, and a lot of it. And to demand that you run specific operating systems in order to do so.
The difference in "forcing another org" to do things is incredible. So I'm never clear why it is felt that people who use expensive products can force other people to adapt, rather than the other way around?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Your second point now I really don't believe because you can't just "use a start menu or desktop icons". You need extensions enabled for that (unless you're using some other distro but you mentioned just Ubuntu). The extensions break frequently between releases. And are nowhere near what people would used to seeing anyway.
Just works "out of the box". For real. No extensions, no extra work. We use it every day, both at customers and internally. It's actually that simple. We can give it to people with zero training or knowledge of Linux, they don't need any training, at all. Anyone who can actually be functional on Windows can use it without the slightest issue.
We also use Raspberry Pi OS sometimes. But Ubuntu mostly.
The icons on the side are a bit different, but it takes moments to get used to that. I'd prefer Cinnamon for that sometimes, but as people move away from apps to just using the browser, it becomes less and less of an issue.
Ok. How many workstations is NTG managing?
Thousands, in many different environments. So it's many hundreds of different scenarios. So we see a fair number of workstations, with hundreds of different business and environmental scenarios.
I'll just be 100% honest. I don't believe this.
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Can you save a few bucks a month per user using LibreOffice, sure?
In the order of $20-$40/month/user
It's a big number in most cases. Much bigger than people let on. Especially when you typically end up having to then pay for it for every user, even those that only open a document once a year, not just the power users.
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Your second point now I really don't believe because you can't just "use a start menu or desktop icons". You need extensions enabled for that (unless you're using some other distro but you mentioned just Ubuntu). The extensions break frequently between releases. And are nowhere near what people would used to seeing anyway.
Just works "out of the box". For real. No extensions, no extra work. We use it every day, both at customers and internally. It's actually that simple. We can give it to people with zero training or knowledge of Linux, they don't need any training, at all. Anyone who can actually be functional on Windows can use it without the slightest issue.
We also use Raspberry Pi OS sometimes. But Ubuntu mostly.
The icons on the side are a bit different, but it takes moments to get used to that. I'd prefer Cinnamon for that sometimes, but as people move away from apps to just using the browser, it becomes less and less of an issue.
Ok. How many workstations is NTG managing?
Thousands, in many different environments. So it's many hundreds of different scenarios. So we see a fair number of workstations, with hundreds of different business and environmental scenarios.
I'll just be 100% honest. I don't believe this.
Sure.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
The problem is that you cannot force people outside your org to use LibreOffice, and even forcing people inside your org to use something far inferior is extremely difficult.
But the assumption is that people outside of your org can force you to use MS Office.
Yeah its true. It's part of doing business. Do you want to do common office tasks with ease, or do you want to try to fit a square peg into a round hole? Businesses are constantly forced to do things by their customers, this is no different.
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
So you have to go to your NTG or whatever IT labor you use and open your pockets at $150-300 an hour when you have an issue.
The obvious examples would be things like Windows or MS Office vs. Ubuntu or LibreOffice.
I seriously have to question if people who like LibreOffice actually use it for business. It is terrible at so many things. This is coming from someone who has used an Ubuntu workstation with LibreOffice for the last 6 years while working for multiple companies. Microsoft Office is 1000x better, and makes collaboration much easier. I have spent so much time trying to get LibreOffice to work or read MS office documents (that everyone else uses), and there has been nothing but issues. Not to mention LibreOffice is slower than MS Office by a good margin. If you work with big documents, LibreOffice is a dog.
I disagree with this as well. I actually have more experience with OpenOffice (not Libre) but the problem is that Microsoft as usual does a lot of proprietary shit in their file formats. Can hardly blame someone else for that.
And I have large files (csv and similar) that can't be opened in Excel because they are too big. But they open just fine in other programs.
But the real problem as I see it is not which office suit you use, but rather that people use the wrong tool for the job. Like trying to use excel to fill out forms and stuffing it with lots of macros and other crap to make a half-assed attempt at something that is barely usable.
This stuff doesn't work with open/libre office but it doesn't even work the same in different office versions.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Can you save a few bucks a month per user using LibreOffice, sure?
In the order of $20-$40/month/user
It's a big number in most cases. Much bigger than people let on. Especially when you typically end up having to then pay for it for every user, even those that only open a document once a year, not just the power users.
Where is $20-$40 coming from?
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
It will cost you more support hours and you will get less productivity.
You say this, but we do this every day and this is absolutely false. Again, I'm not hypothesizing or just trying to push a point, we literally can lower our support pricing for companies doing this because it costs so much less to support. And that's when we aren't the ones buying it.
The amount of additional time needed to deal with the constant breaks and bugs in MS Office is costly. When you are the one paying for the time on tickets, you pay attention. When you pay for the time managing the licensing, you pay attention.
It's easy in the trenches, especially once you are a server engineer, to forget how many tickets and management time is going in to fixing registry breaks, account problems, licensing decisions, application incompatibility, upgrades, etc. for a product. But when you are looking at the tickets over thousands of users, it gets really obvious just all of the ways that a product is costly more to support than another.
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Can you save a few bucks a month per user using LibreOffice, sure?
In the order of $20-$40/month/user
It's a big number in most cases. Much bigger than people let on. Especially when you typically end up having to then pay for it for every user, even those that only open a document once a year, not just the power users.
Where is $20-$40 coming from?
The cost of MS Office and the constant support needs on a per user basis. We have to put in 1-2 hours more per year, per install of MS Office than of any other office product. That is the primary cost of MS Office and can't be overlooked. That's consistently what makes Microsoft products so expensive... their insanely high support needs compared to their main competitors. Not their base price, although that should not be ignored, as it often is.
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@Pete-S said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
But the real problem as I see it is not which office suit you use, but rather that people use the wrong tool for the job. Like trying to use excel to fill out forms and stuffing it with lots of macros and other crap to make a half-assed attempt at something that is barely usable.
This stuff doesn't work with open/libre office but it doesn't even work the same in different office versions.Right, we build apps for that kind of stuff, we don't use office suites for it. So if LibreOffice (or anything) is bad at that stuff, we've solved it through other means.
We only use office products, from any vendor, for very necessary "office document" needs. Not as a general workflow of a place to put data.
Example: some places might use Word as a place to store IT documentation. But we use a wiki.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Can you save a few bucks a month per user using LibreOffice, sure?
In the order of $20-$40/month/user
It's a big number in most cases. Much bigger than people let on. Especially when you typically end up having to then pay for it for every user, even those that only open a document once a year, not just the power users.
Where is $20-$40 coming from?
The cost of MS Office and the constant support needs on a per user basis. We have to put in 1-2 hours more per year, per install of MS Office than of any other office product. That is the primary cost of MS Office and can't be overlooked. That's consistently what makes Microsoft products so expensive... their insanely high support needs compared to their main competitors. Not their base price, although that should not be ignored, as it often is.
So you're saying at a minimum you have $240 per hour of work for a single user per year just for MS Office?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@Pete-S said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
But the real problem as I see it is not which office suit you use, but rather that people use the wrong tool for the job. Like trying to use excel to fill out forms and stuffing it with lots of macros and other crap to make a half-assed attempt at something that is barely usable.
This stuff doesn't work with open/libre office but it doesn't even work the same in different office versions.Right, we build apps for that kind of stuff, we don't use office suites for it. So if LibreOffice (or anything) is bad at that stuff, we've solved it through other means.
We only use office products, from any vendor, for very necessary "office document" needs. Not as a general workflow of a place to put data.
Example: some places might use Word as a place to store IT documentation. But we use a wiki.
And that's not external users that you're supporting. That's a completely different group of people. You've mentioned the users you support up until this part. Sure it's easy to make your internal users use this kind of stuff. How many employees do you have? 30? There's no way all of your external clients are using non MS Office products and you have less to support.
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@Pete-S said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
So you have to go to your NTG or whatever IT labor you use and open your pockets at $150-300 an hour when you have an issue.
The obvious examples would be things like Windows or MS Office vs. Ubuntu or LibreOffice.
I seriously have to question if people who like LibreOffice actually use it for business. It is terrible at so many things. This is coming from someone who has used an Ubuntu workstation with LibreOffice for the last 6 years while working for multiple companies. Microsoft Office is 1000x better, and makes collaboration much easier. I have spent so much time trying to get LibreOffice to work or read MS office documents (that everyone else uses), and there has been nothing but issues. Not to mention LibreOffice is slower than MS Office by a good margin. If you work with big documents, LibreOffice is a dog.
I disagree with this as well. I actually have more experience with OpenOffice (not Libre) but the problem is that Microsoft as usual does a lot of proprietary shit in their file formats. Can hardly blame someone else for that.
And I have large files (csv and similar) that can't be opened in Excel because they are too big. But they open just fine in other programs.
But the real problem as I see it is not which office suit you use, but rather that people use the wrong tool for the job. Like trying to use excel to fill out forms and stuffing it with lots of macros and other crap to make a half-assed attempt at something that is barely usable.
This stuff doesn't work with open/libre office but it doesn't even work the same in different office versions.
Scott,
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate. It isnt 2005 anymore. Standard file servers are a thing of the pass as they should be.
@Pete-S said in File permission and samba help needed:
I have a server running samba. It's messy with lots of files in it and people have been connecting to it using the same username/password.
I want to split this up so I created usernames and passwords for everyone, both in linux and samba.
What I think I want is one share but under that directories for different departments - like HR, finance etc. And the users should have different permissions so they can only see the directories they have permission for.
What is my next step? Should I create groups in linux for each department and then add users to that group? And then change the group owner on the departments directory and files below?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
It will cost you more support hours and you will get less productivity.
You say this, but we do this every day and this is absolutely false. Again, I'm not hypothesizing or just trying to push a point, we literally can lower our support pricing for companies doing this because it costs so much less to support. And that's when we aren't the ones buying it.
The amount of additional time needed to deal with the constant breaks and bugs in MS Office is costly. When you are the one paying for the time on tickets, you pay attention. When you pay for the time managing the licensing, you pay attention.
It's easy in the trenches, especially once you are a server engineer, to forget how many tickets and management time is going in to fixing registry breaks, account problems, licensing decisions, application incompatibility, upgrades, etc. for a product. But when you are looking at the tickets over thousands of users, it gets really obvious just all of the ways that a product is costly more to support than another.
We have right now one Windows PC that is royally screwed up after having had O365 locally installed with Microsoft login. I'm not even going to bother looking at it. Just reinstall OS + everything and start over. Which takes much, much, much longer than installing for instance ubuntu + libreoffice.
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
As you mentioned, LibreOffice and MS Office have compatibility issues and the rest of the world uses MS Office.
This is where things get weird. What do I care what the internal document format is of some other company? First of all, our partners don't primary use MS Office, but ignoring that, neither we, nor the majority of companies we work with, nor most any company that I've ever worked at (anecdotes, I know) should be, or are, exchanging data via office documents. It's an editing tool, not a final results tool. We don't send spreadsheets between companies. And Word style docs are turned into PDFs before going to or from another company.
Sharing office docs in editable form is a huge security risk, and just generally goofy. Are there exceptions? Of course. But it's almost always a broken workflow. It's not a format or tool meant for that kind of use. So if you can fix the bigger picture, it tends to trickle down and fix lots of other things either.
Now sure, if someone with more clout than IT simply demands that a large company spend millions on MS Office so that one or two people don't need to change a really bad workflow, sometimes there is nothing that you can do. I get it. IT doesn't always get to run IT decisions. But stepping back and putting on my owner hat, you want the business to do what is healthy, and spending loads of money on an expensive to support product, to placate a vendor who is so inconsiderate of our profitability that they use proprietary formats to communicate with us, I generally find a vendor who is actually good rather than acting like I'm powerless to demand they act sensibly.
