Service Providers

Started watching The Mandalorian earlier, too.

Home Alone, with the kids, they've never seen it!

The kids and I got features on Carrollton City Limits last night...

https://www.facebook.com/CarrolltonCityLimits/

Quiet day around here. Just been watching some youtube and relaxing.

@Pete-S said in Comparing Office Suites:

Isn't stretching it extremely far to put Zoho among the major players?

Well, for us it's the most major player You can make a case for any of them not being among the majors. MS for not being easy to acquire and use. Google for not being normal. LO for not making any money.

Zoho is likely the last by market share. But it's more like the big boys than not. If you use their product, they feel like a bigger player than MS or Google from how polished and capable their product seems.

Market share matters when you are investing. But product viability and completeness matters when you are talking IT matters.

Second round of Chinooks just went directly over the house.

At NTG, we used MS Office for a while because we were tied to O365 and the products really are great, but the system we found to be problematic and unnecessarily cumbersome and their lack of cross platform compatibility without loads of delays and IT overhead was a huge deal. They just didn't cut it on a technical basis, their online-only products aren't on par with their local installs and are the only ones that work with Linux, ChromeOS, etc. So we found that there was no upside to their products for us, only downsides, even though it was free as an MS partner at the time. Even free, it wasn't good enough, but it was decent.

We moved to LibreOffice and CODE on NextCloud for local and hosted LibreOffice. This worked well and is super cheap. CODE was a huge pain to make work, and super slow. LO locally runs beautifully and requires zero IT overhead. LO on Ubuntu is, I believe, faster than MS Office on Windows. It's smooth and nearly instant and just as well integrated. But you are stuck with CODE for ChromeOS, and that sucks. LO/CODE was a step up from MS Office for us, but not a big step up.

We ended up testing and moving to Zoho Docs, which is purely online. As an always-on to work MSP, the limitations of online only really doesn't exist to us. If we are offline, we can't work anyway. So for us, the downsides of the Zoho approach essentially don't exist. We use Zoho for email and chat already, so the user integration is a huge deal for us. We find the Zoho online docs to be smooth and polished, moreso than G Suite, and feel more like a local MS Office or LO experience. Lots of features, lots of power, runs pretty fast, really good mobile apps, and zero cost (because we have their $1 email.) The unlimited free storage is an awesome feature, as is the ability to fully interoperate between MS Office and LO file formats.

As an MSP, when we talk to customers about their options, costs, and whatever, we find that LibreOffice is the most commonly deployed because once management looks at its features, easy of use, low unnecessary change rate, near zero IT costs (it deploys to every platform via free repos, it's the most broadly available, lowest overhead of any product we've seen) they generally override individual objections to wanting to keep whatever their person and not personally paid for products. The secret being the "business owners" prefer LibreOffice when evaluating organizational needs. Individuals who don't look at the big picture and aren't personally responsible for cost issues, tend to look at limited factors and pick whatever they are used to.

MS Office is super common, and universally hated. Nearly every customer we have with it loathes it and whatever factors are leading them to use it prove to be a weak link in some other product's armor. This is so dramatic that I'm working with a team to make software for whom a major selling point is that it does not use or require MS Office. Most of our customers that use MS Office do so either because it is deeply entrenched from a time before organizational level planning was done and/or the existing files are so entrenched in their workflow that updating would be problematic.

G Suite and Zoho Docs we are starting to see more and more. Only companies with great Internet connections can use them, but that's a lot of companies.

These are really the only four we are seeing in the wild.

So there are four major office suites today, and a few serious small competitors. The big boys are MS Office, LibreOffice, G Suite / Google Docs, and Zoho Office. Smaller players include OnlyOffice, WPS, etc.

Comparing is difficult because none are exactly one to one replacements for another, they are all at least a little unique. Some are local install only, some are remote install only, some are both. Pricing differs based on versions or features. Some have special extra tools like email clients or form creators. Some pieces, like Visio, is technically part of its parent suite, but is not included in a normal purchase.

So comparisons are difficult just because the products vary so much in their approach to everywhere.

Also, there are many vectors for comparison, such as...

• Performance
• Platform Support
• Cost
• Usability
• Document Compatibility
• Local and Remote Options
• Document Storage Options
• IT Support Costs and Needs
• Licensing and Management Overhead

So taking all of the things into consideration, what do people find, like, suggest, etc. From what we see as an MSP, we see all of these and different companies choosing all of them for different reasons. Some they choose because they like them or find them to be a good value, some because it's required by something else in their environment, etc.