Yeah, OnlyOffice is a lot closer to the MS experience which would make it easier for people to transition.

I use both and usually prefer OnlyOffice.

Thank you, I'll give it a look.

Unfortunately change is difficult. If it was just me and my controls team we would probably do something like that, but my boss is a little older and I had hard enough time getting him to work on the cloud as it is, and he works in 2 cities, so he isn't always in reach to help him. If it doesn't behave exactly like windows folders, it might be a lost case.

The other people in the office I could train easier. It's a small office with less than a dozen people on the system at any one time. I am "head of IT" but that isn't my main job. Having something that installs and sets up quickly is a boon. Not that the sharepoint folders update all that quickly, it takes almost a full day for all the files to show up properly, especially if it is a new user. And if onedrive chokes on any one file it completely stops updating file changes until you fix that. Not a problem for anybody with some savvy, but half the people don't even notice until their files have diverged and somebody calls them and asks why they don't see some change or another.

All that being said, if I can save a few hundred dollars a month I could probably eventually talk them into moving over to something cheaper like I did with the Wondershare PDF editor. That was an easy move because it works exactly like Adobe but doesn't crash on large files nearly as often. It is sort of a shame that Adobe is worse at handling their own file format than nearly any other PDF editor.

They could spend 1~2% of the cost of their microsoft licenses to create their own plugins/development to make the UI more usable for their applications and workers, rather than relying on Microsoft themselves or creating plugins on outdated and proprietary frameworks.

It probably won't save money in the first year. The transition will likely offset any gains.

It likely will save money every year after that. For everyone. More users means more interest means a smoother experience for everyone, generally.

Not a silver bullet. This is a deep rabbit hole.

What do you think about Collabora?

I would guess that they, as everyone else, have worked with MS Office all their lives and can do whatever they need without thinking much in there. But libreoffice has some small differences that will break their workflow and will spend time learning how to workaround those instead of doing what they need. For example, my grip is that in MS I can redo the last operation with ctrl+y, where in libre it's ctrl+shift+y. They could very likely allow the former to behave like the latter when redo buffet is empty, but they don't.

Wouldn't it be easier to strike a support deal with the libre office developers and just give them the money to do it?

Never heard of it. Only Office was decent though, the couple of times I used it.

Sure. That is assuming that someone is available on the LibreOffice side to support the ministry for a particular amount, and that the policy related to government procedures can be followed under this agreement.

If you're open to it, would you mind checking it out and share what you think

The Document Foundation doesn't actually employ developers. They just oversee and manage the development and direction of LibreOffice.

The dream here, in FOSS terms, is that governments see the massive potential value in using FOSS, and start actively contributing to it.

Imagine if the German or Danish government puts the people on their IT payroll (who are now maintaining Microsoft systems) to maintain FOSS systems. This would be a huge benefit for everyone, if enough big actors do it, it may be what pushes stuff like Microsoft into being a niche service.

People in government IT jobs who maintain Microsoft systems aren’t going to be contributing to FOSS codebases. They’re not developers.

Nextcloud Office is just Libre Office via Collabora though...

I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.

Probably just to save money really.

That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that's outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis...

same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling

Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.

They can report unusual bugs though and SHOULD be competent enough to write good bug reports

Pretty sure Collabora (company) offers such services.

Calc has loads of small papercuts (tiny usability issues) which added together make it quite horrible to use. It's not polished.