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Hi,
I am currently wondering which office suite I should recommend to my
customers : Symphony or LibreOffice.
As far as I can tell there is no difference between the two in terms of
performance.
But in term of interface and usability it's a different story.
You may need to elaborate a little on the level of experience in generic doc writing concepts of
your users. Symphony is a beginner's product wich has been largely emasculated for any but basic
users. It takes the traditional Lotus approach of imposing their nanny knows best interface
design. I know, because my company mandates it internally and it sucks. Most folk are desparate
to hang on to MS office licenses (on Windows) or Open Office/LibO (if they're on Linux)
After using Symphony for few days, I found that the interface being more
inviting, you are more likely to "play" with the settings and thus
discovering more efficient ways to work.
I'd possibly agree for beginners but I wouldn't then extrapolate that observation to assert
better usability.
I spend a lot of time training and explaining to my customers where to
find which option in OpenOffice/LibreOffice.
I certainly agree there. Open Office usability also sucks, in specific areas. In my view there
should be much more emphasis in this forum on strategically improving the intereface and maybe
some tactical fixes in the short to medium term, rather than the current emphasis on promotional
graphics, important though that is!
So my dilemma is as follow : should I recommend using LibreOffice to
benefit from the rapidly evolving features, or should I recommend
Symphony for it's nice interface ?
Another way to ask the question is : Will LibreOffice's interface evolve
toward a Symphony' style in the near future (3.5, 3.6 ?) ?
As you might have guessed, I wouldn't agree with your assessment of symphony's superiority.
One other thought. Lotus don't appear to have any worthwhile experience outside Windows and their
products are buggy and slow on Linux and don't play well with linux native package management.
Thanks
Noh
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