[libreoffice-design] Re: Who on Earth is the LibO installation target?

On 08/02/2014 15:30, Jean-Francois Nifenecker wrote:

Hi Jean-François,


Very good repost indeed, and unfortunately true in my own experience of
company wide implementations of LO in SMEs.

The current marketing guff attempts to "sell" (and I use that word
loosely) LO to businesses just by stating it is "enterprise-ready".
Unfortunately, this completely ignores the fact that most SMEs have no
or little IT support contracts, and those that do use firms that are
mostly clueless about configuring LO to work correctly in their IT
environment. I have experienced this first hand with various different
IT support firms (from local to national) in various companies over the
past, notwithstanding the various enterprise environment LO/AOO specific
bugs - e.g. reading and writing to network shares to name but one.

As an example of how clueless some IT support departments can be about
LO, I saw a post on the AOO list the other day representing an English
borough council IT support entity that had attempted to send a 27 page
"audit" document to the list in the vain hope that someone in charge
would respond to the questions...OK, I would expect that from someone
whose job is not to manage IT, but seriously, from the IT support entity
itself (third party subcontractor by the looks of it). If the specialist
IT support people don't know what IT is, how is anyone else in a SME on
whom the job is thrust going to know ? (perhaps that particular
situation also speaks volumes for how low market penetration and
awareness of LO in public administration in the UK is, and certainly
doesn't reflect very highly on the IT support firm).

Anyway, to cut a long digression short, yes, I would agree that the
project doesn't currently address the needs of SMEs or even
administrations other than through the "buy a support contract" mantra,
which is currently how the Board appear to see development and
penetration of LO increasing and TDF with LO really establishing itself
long term.

Of course, as no doubt anyone from the marketing team reading this would
say "Please feel free to contribute materials to the project, the door
is wide open."

;-)


Alex


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