25 Oct
2011
25 Oct
'11
9:28 p.m.
On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 11:46:03PM +0400, Haru Mamburu wrote:
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
I often assist with upgrades in professional offices. Every single
person in those offices uses MSOffice as the primary office tool.
That is the Enterprise class operations world. You don't tell them
to change operations. You either seamlessly integrate with existing
operations or... you don't even get a foot in the door.
The idea that I could have a means of working seamlessly with
various office teams on documents held on a wiki was a killer
app that truly made XWiki appear to deserve the title "Enterprise".
Without that feature... not so much. In fact, probably not worth
the trouble of switching away from MoinMoin which is debian packaged
and more or less standard already.
Perhaps this is a bit off the technology which most here wish to
discuss. But if you truly want to be Enterprise, then you have to
think business operations in companies with staffs larger than
some small countries and where costs of roll out of 'new' applications
takes months and includes training budgets alone could be in the
millions of dollars.
The word 'Enterprise' requires a totally different, utterly conservative,
bottom line 'it just works invisbily with the existing staff,
procedures and infrastructure' attitude.