Do any of you work in environments that refuse to use O365?

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Craig__D@reddit

We use Office with perpetual licensing. We have barely dipped our toe into the Azure world.

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GrecoMontgomery@reddit

I'm genuinely curious and would very much like to have a water cooler conversation with you on what types of pain points your org is still dealing with in 2023.

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Craig__D@reddit

Offer still stands, as long as you're not soliciting

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I can't believe companies think they save money by using perpetual license for office. The cost to value ratio of the m365 suite is insane. $150/yr. Full office suits, secure exchange email, powerapps, power Automate, 1tb cloud, sharepoint online and about 20 additional apps. Oh and you can install office on 5 different devices per account. But the 60yr in charge says, nah it's a scam. I'd rather pay $400 for 4 apps that becomes outdated in 5 years.

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Craig__D@reddit

>But the 60yr in charge says, nah it's a scam. I'd rather pay $400 for 4 apps that becomes outdated in 5 years. That's a nice little nugget you threw in there for good measure. I assume you're referring to Business Standard, which is $12.50 / user / month - making it $150 / user / year. Cool. Got it. That means for our 60 licenses we would pay $9,000 / year for all 60 users. In the seven years since 2016 that means we would have paid $63,000 to Microsoft (and would have had updates forced on us every month... I think). We paid $26,000 in 2016. Nothing for Office since. We have datacenter licensing for the OS, so there is no associated OS licensing cost for the Exchange server FYI. We did have to license Exchange and CALs. I'm not gonna look up that cost, but I assure you it wasn't $37,000. We're also not upgrading Office this year, so the cost different will widen even further. We run a SharePoint server in-house, so we're not missing that. I don't personally feel that the 2016 Office product is "outdated" even now, and certainly wasn't in 2021 (your claimed 5-year obsolescence window). Last time I checked, our Excel formulas still calculate properly and Word can still make text bold and italicized. We don't need Teams (we have that functionality in our telephone system software). Plus, you don't know my organization or its needs. You don't know out environment or computing platforms. You can do the math above to see how I believe my company has saved money. I fully understand the time will come when there is no option except O365. I also acknowledge that there are some benefits (PowerAutomate does look useful). I'm just currently not in a rush to go there. I have yet to have be convinced that it's right for us. I'm open-minded enough to change my mind. Keep trying. I'll admit it if I am convinced that my current stance is wrong.

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TxTechnician@reddit

Good points. You're right, I don't know your situation. I manage sohos with 5-20 employees on average. The cost value of having a cloud managed AD vs having an on-site server for these small companies is a no brainer. Intune to lock down company owned Cell phones tablets and pcs (even Linux). A fully managed email server with 99.9% uptime. A file sharing system, and document management system. A full office suite complete with online versions so you can work from litteraly anywhere. The ability to securely backup and manage your devices (one drive for business). Power Platform: create web apps and automated workflows using a functional language similar to excel. (it really is a game changer). Teams, Microsoft lists, Forms, stream (litteraly a company video platform) , and a crap ton of other apps. When I come in to these facilities. I am bringing managed organization and a plethora of secure applications that make work easier. The client's are almost always sharing personal office accounts. Or worse, they have cracked versions of office (there are a few Mal techs around my area). Using personal email for business (no security or backup). Have no file sharing system or are using a pc with windows home and no backup in a closet to manage their documents... About 1 in 10 clients I present to will have the one C Level who hears the pitch and then says: >"why would I pay $xx per user per year for WORD???" And then I have to reexplain that a M365 sub <> only having ms word. It boiled down to ppl just not knowing IT. Or being someone whose never worked in a managed environment. Have you ever worked somewhere where data isn't managed? I have, it was horrible. And I switched it to a managed solution. I was the person who turned it into a managed environment. > outdated When you buy a perpetual license you're guaranteed updates for a specific amount of time. I believe that time was 5 years. With a subscription, you're always running the latest tested version. >too many systems. I've come to companies who were using excel to store data. QuickBooks as a ticketing system. (not help desk addon, straight up logging tickets as $0 invoices). Free Google drive as a storage system. Free Yahoo as their business email. And just a mix of other systems not being used for their intended purpose. Solutions like, M365, Gsuite, Zoho, Odoo, are the way to go. But, of course, no system matches every situation. Like a bank for example. They can't use aloy of the M365 apps because of compliance.

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Craig__D@reddit

Intune isn't included at your chosen example price point. You have to step up a level to get Intune, so in my case the dollar differential (raw savings) would increase.

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TxTechnician@reddit

Definitely. A good exercise. And the reason I used $xx in my second example was to exclude the necessity of having to discuss pricing in terms of real dollars. I wanted to focus on having a subscription for all included services vs having to purchase licenses for all services seperatly. For a 10 person shop, wanting the whole package you'd be looking at ~2,700 / yr with no upfront cost (for hardware). Vs the cost of setting up each service individually (like if they decided to use proton drive, Google for email, etc) + having an on site server.

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pdp10@reddit

Microsoft have been masters of the bundle for thirty years. If you plan to use almost everything, the pricing is very attractive but you're locking yourself in. The same with Adobe Creative Suite and then Creative Cloud. The enterprise price [looks to be $1020 per year per seat now](https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/business/teams/plans.html). That's more than [list price for CS6](https://prodesigntools.com/products/adobe-cs6-pricing-list.html) after two years at most. We used to upgrade half of the Adobe seats with every release, but Adobe has made that no longer an option, so comparative costs would have more than doubled.

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TxTechnician@reddit

Adobe prices are crazy unless you really utilize the product. For me FOSS stuff works great. For my friend who does graphic design all day long the Adobe suite makes sense. As a student I had student pricing. As soon as I lost that pricing. Adobe lost a customer. I just don't use it often enough. And when I do, I don't need all the fancy features.

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pdp10@reddit

There are a lot of alternatives to Adobe apps that aren't FOSS: * Davinci Resolve is popular in both the video color/editing space *and* entry level, for those who aren't in sectors where something else is traditional, like film and content television where Avid is dominant. * Serif Affinity offers a three-app suite for raster, vector, and DTP. * [Corel Aftershot Pro](https://www.aftershotpro.com/en/) (formerly Bibble) is a RAW format editor. * [Skylum Luminar](https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/skylum-luminar) * [VueScan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VueScan) for scanning negatives and regular print material (does Adobe do this any more?) * Lightworks video editor * Kinemaster (mobile) ... and many that are FOSS: * Krita * Blender * Handbrake && ffmpeg * Inkscape * Scribus * [LightZone](https://github.com/ktgw0316/LightZone) * RawTherapee * [Darktable](https://www.darktable.org/) * GIMP/Glimpse * [Rawstudio](https://rawstudio.org/) * ArmorPaint * [Photivo](https://photivo.org/) * Shotwell * [Shotcut](https://shotcut.org/) * [Openshot](https://www.openshot.org/) * [Kdenlive](https://kdenlive.org/en/)

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TxTechnician@reddit

Just picked up Inkscape. Love the interface. Gimp is nice. But the interface isn't the best. Installed kdenlive the other day.

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Ssakaa@reddit

Over here in academia... Adobe took the "This is your new bill. Pay it." approach when they stopped offering us one-off acrobat pro licensing and demanded we pay per-head for creative cloud across the board. *Almost* Oracle level extortion tone to it. It was fun.

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disclosure5@reddit

I've worked with several companies that cycled through this. That is, someone decides they can save a fortune on licensing, someone's nephew walks around replacing Office. It always rolls back within a year, with staff basically mutinying over their inability to to find the Word icon.

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bluescreenfog@reddit

Worse yet: moving to boxed copies of office because it's cheaper than cloud. And then having to migrate them back to the cloud because the overhead in managing license keys was a fucking nightmare. Not my idea.

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StaffOfDoom@reddit

Why not an enterprise agreement? They do sell standalone Office (but you have to twist arms to get your VAR to admit it…)

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ITGuyfromIA@reddit

If they went from 365 to boxed copies due to cost, they definitely would not have entertained the idea of volume licensing as it would be even more expensive

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syshum@reddit

Sounds like they were not buying legit copies of office then, getting some ebay special licenses... No way Retail boxed office was less than MPSA or other Agreement Volume License. Either the VAR was taking them for a ride, or they were buying some large enterprises unused keys.

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ITGuyfromIA@reddit

Boxed is definitely the cheapest, up-front way to acquire Office without a subscription. It's also the one where you get shafted managing individual keys/accounts and don't get a chance for software assurance, etc. Just took a quick look, but CDW has 2021 Pro Plus through MPSA @ $573.99 Boxed Pro is $439.99. Especially once you consider most companies I see doing this go for Home & Business which runs $249

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syshum@reddit

No one is buying anything on mpsa at the cdw published retail price. It is not uncommon for cdw to list all kinds of crazy in their catalog. For example they have a office pro plus listed for $815...

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bluescreenfog@reddit

I have no idea. They didn't really manage IT so much as just "make it work" from what I've come across.

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peterAtheist@reddit

Limiting the dependence on Microsoft is now my #1 selling point - and it works great. Google Workspace / LibreOffice / Thunderbird Using [https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gcpw/](https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gcpw/) to get rid of AD in whatever shape/form

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TxTechnician@reddit

Your name intrigued me. So I viewed your post history. You transitioned your account from mainly engaging in athiesm to engaging in tech subs. What happened? Ya find God?

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peterAtheist@reddit

Day job vs life vision - what brought me here vs what keeps me here.

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TxTechnician@reddit

Right on.

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gihutgishuiruv@reddit

> Limiting the dependence on Microsoft And changing it to dependence on Google?

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Texas_Technician@reddit

So gcpw doesn't really eliminate the need for AD. It just covers one aspect of it. Authentication. Still use full. I got sick of the crap from windows and made the full switch to Linux a few months ago. Used popos for a few years on my laptop. But always kept my desktop windows. On account of I mostly do dev work on the microsoft platform. Switched everything over to Kubuntu and I love it. I love Microsofts cloud platform. I hate windows.

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juosukai@reddit

Well, gcpw covers the most important aspect of ad that a company needs. I'll nice you have that running, you can find that most companies work just fine without ad.

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TxTechnician@reddit

Lol, my browser was still logged into my old account.

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4675636B2121@reddit

I'd be really surprised if there were any serious businesses using LibreOffice aside from a few niche situations. I keep it on my machine at work for a few things, and I like it, but I'd quit if someone decided we were going to deploy it across the company.

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USS_Frontier@reddit (OP)

> but I'd quit if someone decided we were going to deploy it across the company. Why? Just curious.

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disclosure5@reddit

Some guy in accounting that can't get his Excel formula to work won't defer to company policy, he'll piss and moan at you until it's "fixed".

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OcotilloWells@reddit

How is calc compared to excel? I've only used it to look at .csv files really.

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disclosure5@reddit

Nothing but Excel is going to load that 3000 line VB script that noone outside of accounting has any ability to read.

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ZAFJB@reddit

> Some guy in accounting that can't get his Excel formula to work Will almost always be right.

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spazonator@reddit

Increased support costs both operationally and depending on the organization and how they calculate risk, rolling out Libre as the 'officially supported/endorsed' application can increase liability coverage either implicitly through insurance arrangements or explicitly for any incurred compliance overhead taken on directly now by an organization. To most these are fringe circumstances but to others compliance and risk management questions could be up to a week or two of meetings getting everyone on the same page and all the boxes checked. Generally, unless a company works in a heavily regulated space, individual use of non-supported applications by power users isn't an issue. The issue becomes when the organization decides to officially utilize a tool or vendor.

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pdp10@reddit

> rolling out Libre as the 'officially supported/endorsed' application can increase liability coverage either implicitly through insurance arrangements or explicitly for any incurred compliance overhead Please tell us more. I didn't know anyone was in the business of paying out if software doesn't work.

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IrishInUSA7943@reddit

Supportability. We can figure it out, fine, but try explaining to Janice in Accounting

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pdp10@reddit

The whole French national military police and the Italian ministry of defense use [LibreOffice](https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/libreoffice). Big commercial users don't usually publicize the fact, for the same reasons they don't publicize which printers and copiers they use.

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4675636B2121@reddit

Got curious so I googled a bit. Conveniently, LibreOffice has a list of public and private sector migrations that have been done, planned, and ongoing. Pretty neat. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations

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4675636B2121@reddit

I remember reading about a lot of French government agencies switching over to Linux in general. This was over a decade ago if I remember correctly?

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ZackMac26@reddit

We use Office 2021 standalone.

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USS_Frontier@reddit (OP)

How much easier is it to deal with from a licensing standpoint?

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peterAtheist@reddit

It isn't but you can out-smart it a little bit by using alias eMail address like: [lic+PCname@example.com](mailto:lic+PCname@example.com) The + sign is ignored so all eMail comes to [lic@example.com](mailto:lic@example.com), yet you have diff accts to register the lic, and you can keep track as to what sits where.

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AtarukA@reddit

How about just inserting the key?

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bluehairminerboy@reddit

Can't any more if you buy retail copies of Office, has to be linked to a MSA

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peterAtheist@reddit

could be Looooooooooooooooooooong

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AtarukA@reddit

Sounds faster than creating emails though, especially if you wanna move the licence.

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jantari@reddit

Uuuuh what do email addresses have to do with Microsoft Word licenses

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bluehairminerboy@reddit

If you buy off the shelf Office 2021 licenses you can't just use the product key, you have to assign them to a consumer MSA ( and there's a limit of like 10 or 15 licences per account )

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DiggyTroll@reddit

Some folks confuse a UPN with an email address. Sure, they might be the same in some orgs, but that’s an admin choice. Office licensing displays the UPN.

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torbar203@reddit

I don’t think a few of these commenters actually know what volume licensing/KMS is

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bluescreenfog@reddit

Easier than 365? It fucking isn't. You have to create a million Microsoft accounts to add the keys to. It's a joke.

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jantari@reddit

What? You don't need a single account. Maybe one for VLSC access. Then you use Active Directory based activation which means any time you even just install Office it automatically licenses itself without anyone doing anything. Wtf are you doing licensing individual installs? Is this a joke?

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bluescreenfog@reddit

My predecessor was using boxed copies of office, or buying them online with MS accounts. That's more what I was referring to, on the back of a different reply.

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finished_focus@reddit

My predecessor was giving people O365 licenses, and removing them after a couple minutes. 75% of my tickets were “my office says it’s unlicensed.” He’d put on the license to remove the prompt, then remove it, and the prompt would come back after a couple days. It was a nightmare to deal with until Janice from Accounting helped me get him to stop. 😂

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bluescreenfog@reddit

Wow that's actually amazing. 😂😂

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ZackMac26@reddit

Well, we have a KMS key and push licenses via a KMS server, so incredibly easy.

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lemachet@reddit

I mean, there are some total google-native enterprises out there.

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Beginning_Ad1239@reddit

The company I work at moved from Lotus Notes to Google over 10 years ago and has stayed with it. Google's price keeps going up every renewal but it's still a little cheaper than M365.

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phillyfyre@reddit

If Google could get Meet to the level of teams ? Slam dunk , we still pay for zoom cause GWorkspace video conferencing blows

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Beginning_Ad1239@reddit

I think Meet is much superior to Teams. Teams is terrible in large meetings.

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zachsandberg@reddit

Arguably worse than O365. I don't like Outlook, but I hate everything about Google Docs.

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pdp10@reddit

I'd rather use cuneiform on wax tablets than MS Outlook.

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Ssakaa@reddit

OWA is halfway bearable. I particularly hate that ctrl+f isn't find in proper Outlook.

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Gloomy_Stage@reddit

Agree with that. A few years ago I migrated my organisation from G-Suite to 365. Big project but 365 features and integration are so much better; particularly on the automation side. This is particularly true on a Windows network.

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USS_Frontier@reddit (OP)

Oh yeah, forgot about that. Those apps do seem simple enough to use. I just wish gmail was debloated a little bit.

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EnglishAdmin@reddit

Curious, what seems bloated about Gmail?

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ZachVIA@reddit

Yeah, we recently acquired an anti-Microsoft company that was using pretty much all Google and Macs. They now all use O365 and 75% use Windows OS now.

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Snorlax_420@reddit

I fucking despise working with vendors that use Google sheets instead of excel

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phillyfyre@reddit

Google workspace plus office for certain users , I keep libre on my machine because of flexibility, but I'm considered weird

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LiamAPEX1@reddit

I did for a long time, till I took over as IT Manager then it was the first thing I implemented and now my MD and GM say weekly how much better it is and how we should have done it years ago. We had a pop 3 mail server with no spam filter and 100mb mailboxes s before. It was utter shit

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USS_Frontier@reddit (OP)

Stupid question. Why does POP still exist?

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pdp10@reddit

IMAP protocol subsumed POP3 a long time ago. But the design with POP is for users to delete each mail from the server after it's been confirmed to be downloaded successfully, while the design for IMAP expects mail to live on the server indefinitely. It seems that providers who see themselves as being in the business of mail delivery but *not* storage continued to use POP, with enterprise environments or webmail type operations using IMAP.

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LiamAPEX1@reddit

Cost… that’s why… our pop3 system for upto 250 mail boxes was $500 a year. Our o365 client for 45 users is $200 a month

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LiamAPEX1@reddit

Fuck knows. I feel intolerant to it the amount of corrupted 50gb mailboxes I have fixed and server download problems I have dealt with. O365 was a blessing when we moved. I love it.

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browngray@reddit

Full Google Workspace and a fleet of Macbooks/Linux on laptops. M365 and Windows requires an exception like external-facing employees who need to share documents. We don't *need* MS software (aside from maybe devs who like VS Code) to do our jobs in the strictest sense of the word.

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MistiInTheStreet@reddit

Recently I have mostly seen people to complain to not have access to google docs. But maybe because they have access to office 365 only. I have been told by business that google docs (sheets) is way more advanced.

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KaelthasX3@reddit

> I have been told by business that google docs (sheets) is way more advanced. That's a hot take.

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DiggyTroll@reddit

Depends on how you use it. To the casual user, Sheets’ UI is certainly less advanced. It doesn’t always work the same way as an Excel user would expect. While its cell ranges are artificially limited, Sheets performs better at scale (which isn’t at all interesting to an accountant). Someone who knows JavaScript can feed it with realtime stats from VMs, pipelines, pub/sub, etc. Google Docs, including Sheets, have a database architecture with emergent properties like fine versioning and collaboration that Excel’s file-based architecture can’t touch. Performance is good enough that you can use a Sheet as a backend data store for a web app.

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tritonx@reddit

Where can I apply ?

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jantari@reddit

My entire company types LaTeX in vim. And then I woke up.

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Skeletor216@reddit

A lot of school districts are full Google suite since it's free

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DiggyTroll@reddit

Some, like us, still pay Google in order to get more powerful Workspace surveillance and device management features. Flying blind is no fun when the kids are making trouble!

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ukkie2000@reddit

Yes! We need to test libreoffice before we're allowed to purchase an office license for a user It's quite frustrating, because we need to spend a lot of time understanding user requirements for the sheets app, testing libreoffice and making sure it works for their needs..... only for them to come back later to say they just really don't like it. But hey, it saves money... right?

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ZAFJB@reddit

So are you running both, and testing for each installation? Crazy. That definitely doesn't save you money.

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pdp10@reddit

If you can't run two different things side by side, you can't ever migrate. And if you can't ever migrate, you're going to be stuck buying million-dollar IBM mainframes with [three million dollar software licensing](https://npifinancial.com/blog/ibm-monthly-license-charges-increasing-more-than-usual/), while your competitors are running a webapp on a thousand cloud instances at 90% less than your cost structure, including devops.

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ZAFJB@reddit

What u/ukkie2000 appears to be talking about is not a migration, but ad hoc decision making on a per user deployment basis.

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MatoKoukku@reddit

Many orgs need to run on-prem for regulatory reasons. Can be exchange or something else.

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Ssakaa@reddit

While there's certainly segments of that *outside* the US... *within* the US, there's not a whole lot on that front anymore. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/government#tabx6a1bd4ad518644228c9e92bf6a4091d1

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MavZA@reddit

Fairly common in software dev actually. I work for one now and we don’t run a domain.

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xiongchiamiov@reddit

Yep, there's not terribly much need for the Office suite from most of the company and so the rest makes due with Google's suite and whatever your wiki software is. I know that tons of people use Office to do... things, but not having ever worked in a company that used it, I struggle to know what those things would be.

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spetcnaz@reddit

I have worked for a financial institution, a small one, but a financial institution none the less, that as far I know, to this day refuses to switch from a basic POP3/IMAP hosted service. Why? The owner is cheap, and won't spend the money to move to a proper email system. Untill of course he gets hacked and or audited.

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Chuffed_Canadian@reddit

Google workspace, sure. Or Office apps but no AD (rarer these days). I’ve never seen LibreOffice used at scale, though. The only example I can think of is some governments in Germany switched to Linux + LibreOffice for a time. I think some/all switched back, though because users. I’m sure you could find tonnes of small businesses (<10 employees) using LibreOffice, though. But most of those probably don’t have full time IT.

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Hoovybro@reddit

We actually run workspaces + libre office for rare times it’s needed. 99% satisfaction. Only one person (a CEO) who refuses to use anything but office + visio lmao. Also let’s our devs work platform agnostic (myself and all of them run Linux except one who prefers windows + WSL)

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Away-Astronomer-4292@reddit

>The only example I can think of is some governments in Germany switched to Linux + LibreOffice for a time. I think some/all switched back, though because users. I recall reading that they changed back because MS offered to open a new HQ in Germany.

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pdp10@reddit

> I think some/all switched back, though because users. There were a lot of misleading headlines when Munich's new mayor and vice mayor got headlines by being Microsoft fans who vowed to make the whole government migrate away from Linux, in 2014. [Nothing happened then, and not too much seems to have happened since.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline) There's also the French military police and Italian defense ministry using LibreOffice, but hardly any of the general public know that.

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slazer2au@reddit

My wife works for the Dutch government and they use libre office because why pay for office when you still use Lotus for emails.

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RCG89@reddit

I work at one place. Perpetual licenced Office 2019. Exchange 2016 on prem. No cloud at all

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Craig__D@reddit

This is us. We bought Microsoft Office 2016 perpetual licenses back in 2016 and haven’t given them a penny for Office licensing since then.

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caponate@reddit

You're also excluded from the constant stream of updates that o365 hands out that cause tons of issues or they make settings changes without your consent. Like when they decided to add teams meetings to all new scheduled meetings.

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CompWizrd@reddit

They did move that Folders/Calendar/Notes tab to the side on perpetual 2016/2019. That got me a couple minutes of rant from an end-user about Microsoft.

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caponate@reddit

That’s true, though it was a quick fix with registry GPO.

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RiffRaff028@reddit

We are in the process of ditching Exchange, Outlook, and everything else Microsoft except for Word and Excel, which we will install as stand-alone programs. Due to my IT background, I'm beta-testing all the changes the IT manager wants to implement, such as moving my calendar from Outlook to Zoho and integrating it and our current Exchange server with Thunderbird. PowerPoint remains a sticking point since he doesn't want to use LibreOffice, despite my attempts to convince him otherwise, and I am testing a few different presentation options, none of which really stack up but would suffice. Prezi, ManyCam, and Camtasia are the front runners for that. (Not FOSS options.) He's moving everybody from PCs to Macs as their computers come due for replacement, and he's going to let me install Linux once we get everything else working. This is a very slow process. Back in the early 2000s when I was a sysadmin at a company I tried my best to move people away from Microsoft products, and actually made some nice headway, but Word and Excel were always problematic due to the minor formatting issues that pop up when you open one format in the other. So, sending an ODT document to a customer using Word or vice versa was always problematic. Best I could do was get a user on a Linux system with Thunderbird as their e-mail client, but I would still have to get Word and Excel running on that system. Short story: It's nice to think about and is technically achievable, but in real-world office environments it's not that easy.

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Away-Astronomer-4292@reddit

How many users are you going to be teaching Thunderbird to?

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RiffRaff028@reddit

Couple dozen, maybe, and "teaching" is a little strong. Most of our people are pretty technology savvy. Right now it's just limited to me to see if there are any glitches with TBird accessing Zoho Calendar, and the next step will be integrating it with Zoho Mail. But so far, everything has worked perfectly. Only Microsoft products on my laptop right now are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

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pdp10@reddit

It's likely that "formatting issues" are [actually due to size differences in default fonts](https://wiki.debian.org/SubstitutingCalibriAndCambriaFonts), which I believe Microsoft changed quietly in 2013. There are drop-in compatible fonts but the names are trademarked or something, which adds some complexity. Way back in the day, RTF was often favored for interorganizational transfers of electronic docs, especially among security-conscious sites. It worked well at the time, but I haven't tried it recently. We quite rarely work with document files today like back then.

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Volxz_@reddit

I work at a software company that provides managed web services (think WordPress.com). Huge company but with developers there's not as much ability to restrict and enforce. We all get MacBooks and use GSuite. We used to have AD and O365 but it caused a ton of issues. Now we're all google and apple and everything has been running smoothly.

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JerRatt1980@reddit

We have plenty of on premise exchange clients who use office pro plus installs. They save a ton of money each year over our O365 clients.

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llDemonll@reddit

Drives me crazy when orgs go with Google to save money. Then pay for Slack, Zoom, Asana, I’ve seen Dropbox even, Office office desktop versions because people can’t live without Word and Excel. All because they…didn’t wanna pay like $20 a month so now they’re paying like $40 in the end?

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juosukai@reddit

If you go google, why on earth would you pay for any of those, apart from slack? Ok, maybe Asana, I would not want to manage projects in docs, but there is nothing that comes with the normal office suite that covers those same niches (teams is just as bad as chat), so you would need them even if you were on Ms.

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llDemonll@reddit

No idea, not my company. Heard the same situation from a few friends and it always makes me laugh.

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juosukai@reddit

Oh, I have seen this as well, but my point was that there absolutely nothing missing on Google which would lead to this more than with o365. This is just people wanting the new shiny and not trying to get the maximum worth from the stuff they pay for and (I fear) some consultants/msps that are happy to gauge people who do not know better.

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pdp10@reddit

> Drives me crazy when orgs go with Google to save money. They might even buy Macs. It's just crazy out there, huh? Readers may already know that the big cost savings come by totally avoiding [Microsoft servers and CAL licensing](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/pricing). Desktops don't make any difference directly, only indirectly. Microsoft is obviously trying to shift the userbase into subscription services, and make on-premises Microsoft infrastructure into the same expensive legacy indulgence as IBM mainframes.

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themeanteam@reddit

We use full Google Workspace, 80-90 users. Some users have Office apps and that’s about it. Works great 90% of the case. Costs and manpower to switch is too much at the moment considering the workflows. It does have its limitations sure. I inherited this infrastructure.

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Terriblyboard@reddit

Last place i worked went to 100% Google environment. Worked well. Some people still got office for excel power users or execs that bitched a lot. I have never seen Libra office deployed widely but I am sure they are out there.

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ZAFJB@reddit

If you use FOSS, you have no inherent support. Many regulatory regime *require* that you use supported software. So, you either have to prove that you can support yourself, or you pay a third party for support. Either way this support it costs money. Now your FOSS is not totally free, anymore. So you have to make a judgement on whether it still actually saves you money. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

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pdp10@reddit

"Support" means something like four entirely different things. We have some Debian Linux servers that are officially supported by the vendor on a support schedule, and in compliance with all regulatory regimes I'm personally familiar with. We also have other Linux vendors for supplier diversity, which has been extremely valuable, like when we migrated away from CentOS many years ago because we didn't like the support or the direction. > Now your FOSS is not totally free, anymore. The computers we run it on aren't *gratis*, and neither is the electricity or the skilled engineers. I suppose this comes down to how one's accounting department chooses to handle things. It hasn't been an issue for us, but perhaps others have difference experiences.

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caponate@reddit

I don't think you understand what the free in FOSS means.

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ZAFJB@reddit

I do.

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littleredwagen@reddit

I don’t, I refuse when I have modern infrastructure and the now how to administrate Exchange. Never mind the fact O365 would cost me more then my EA agreement

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ManiSubramanian@reddit

Yes I've seen it in multiple projects, where we don't have access to any MS apps, even outlook. In Linux environments, I've used Apache OpenOffice in some settings and Thunderbird. https://preview.redd.it/i78dlik5yswa1.jpeg?width=7919&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=8938776ff030c569aa9f72154de897c5304aeef3 Though not very user friendly.. they are free!

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KaelthasX3@reddit

Only if your time has no value ;)

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pdp10@reddit

I'm biased, but I always notice the double standard when people point out that learning to use some software has a tangible cost, while ignoring the same investment costs for different software. An awful lot of people learned computers on Apple ][s running VisiCalc, but I don't have a mob outside my office demanding Apple ][s with VisiCalc, you know? --- VisiCalc `.DIF` makes a good portable exchange format when TSV isn't enough, by the way. App vendors used to support documented plaintext interchange formats in the before-times: [DXF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoCAD_DXF), RTF, SYLK, [MIF](https://www.w3.org/Tools/fm2html.html). Vendors stopped doing this when they'd expanded their customer bases beyond the original highly-sophisticated power users and enterprises. Now you get to download a mobile app to make your new smart doorbell work, so have fun reaping that whirlwind.

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Away-Astronomer-4292@reddit

I agree with this post. I am always surprised when I hear people working in CS talk about how non user friendly linux is. They seem completely unaware that they likely have 10K+ hours learning Windows and they have forgotten what it was like to learn to do basic file or administrative operations.

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ManiSubramanian@reddit

:)

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Past-Avocado-5800@reddit

We use Google Workspace for everyone and license the Office desktop apps only (no online services) with O365 for the small percentage of our users who need it (mostly Accounting). I’d like to switch to all-Microsoft, but leadership feels our users would be lost without Gmail.

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flotey@reddit

Yes. Full Linux Client environment here. Libreoffice is the only way to have offline access to stuff like presentations. Also hardcore Opensource developers who hate Microsoft with every cell of their bodies. Sometimes it's a mindset. Sometimes it's the reality if you don't sell your whole soul to Microsoft.

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pdp10@reddit

> Libreoffice is the only way to have offline access to stuff like presentations. I do use LibreOffice most often to view downloaded `.pptx` files, a few times a year. But in-house we use tools like Reveal.js/Impress.js and LaTeX Beamer. Probably quite a few use Keynote, but if they've exporting as PDF or HTML, I wouldn't have noticed.

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flotey@reddit

We do it as well. IT always advise to have a pdf. Libreoffice is more for last minute presentations in a plane to the customer.

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GraemMcduff@reddit

2012 to 2014, I worked for a fairly well-known web hosting company that ran almost 100% on Linux and used open source software for at least 90% of everything they did. They did move to using Google Apps for internal communication instead of their own email and xmpp servers while I worked there. I think for them, it was more of a principled choice to use open source as much as possible than it was about being cheap and trying to save money. And seeing that they had thousands of Linux based web hosting servers to maintain, they had plenty of experienced and knowledge Linux sysadmins who knew how to make an environment like that work properly. Not just some guys "tech savvy" relative who thinks he knows how to save the company money by using software you don't have to pay for. They also had devs who contributed code to and of the open source projects they profited from (mostly WordPress, since about 95% of their customer's websites ran on WordPress, improving WordPress also meant improving their own product). I believe they also donated to several of the open source projects they used. Before that I also worked for a company that only used LibreOffice and Thunderbird. That was about saving money, but it worked fine for their needs and wasn't a burden. Currently I have a few clients who are all using Mac computers and one of them uses Google Workspace for email and etc but they all use Microsoft 365 for Office software. Personally, I have no problem with using alternatives if you know what you are doing and can do it right, they work fine, but something I try to help people understand is that you don't really save money with free and open source software. You just spend it in other places. When it comes to perpetual licenses for software vs subscription, I occasionally do see some who believe that owning a perpetual license and using that version of the software as long as possible will save them money. It usually doesn't take much to convince them otherwise. I can usually point to the support lifecycle of the perpetual software, and explain the security risks of running software that is past is end of life. After seeing that buying new perpetual licenses every x number of years to stay in support costs about the same as a subscription over the same period, out suddenly makes a lot for sense. For a lot of businesses these days having a monthly subscription for software licensing is more palatable than buying new licenses every couple years, because it becomes an operating expense instead of a capital expenditure every two or three years.

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GrecoMontgomery@reddit

HCL Domino and Notes for the win!

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caponate@reddit

I have 3 clients that refuse to go o365 or cloud. They use exchange 2019 (2 of them are 2 node DAG) and office 2021 open license. It's not a money thing, some are restricted by compliance, one of them just doesn't want to. These are also the clients we get the least support calls about office issues from... Big surprise.

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pdp10@reddit

What's O365? I almost never fire up LibreOffice, but we encourage users to use all the tools at their disposal -- *even Emacs*. [Or WordPerfect](https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/wordperfect.html). We even have perverts who like to use [an Electron-based IDE with a langserver](https://langserver.org/) to type their markup.

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KyroPaul@reddit

Must be companies running on nextcloud and Colaba (at least their marketing would lead me to believe there are).

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diwhychuck@reddit

K12 here we are google org. It works alright for the most part. Docs has come a long way now supporting office files with live file doc support meaning no longer have to convert. We are no longer is AD or ldap. Purely driven by money. We can’t afford enterprise hardware anymore. Dell,Apple you name it has pretty much killed off school discounts that made it affordable. Yeah chromebooks don’t last but 250 bucks an a screen is 25 bucks, that’s hard to beat when a screen takes 1 minute to replace. Yeah I’d love for us to have a nice pc laptops an server hardware to control it. But it is what it is. Our local social security office do donate equipment to us but your talking equipment from 2016 an down. I do envy private sector budgets sometimes.

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EpexSpex@reddit

Our MSP has a ADHOC customer who use older versions of MS office (2016) and refuse to upgrade to office 365 for "security reasons" The best reason iv been gave is the French don't trust the Americans. (French company) They also have a Linux based environment and their onsite IT guys know nothing about Linux so all the works falls to us. which is idiotic.

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frac6969@reddit

Not free, but we used to use Office 2019 and a really cheap POP3 mail service. He wanted to use a free office suite but I managed to convince him not to but he was adamant on the perpetual license Office. When the pandemic happened boss asked us to buy Webex. Webex is so much more expensive and harder to use than Teams. After the first year we switched to 365 Business Basic and got rid of the POP3. (Business Basic is only $3 instead of $6 in my country.) Right now we’re moving slowly to Business Standard ($10) but we spent so much on Office 2019 it’ll take a few more years.

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dasdzoni@reddit

Up unil a year and a half we didnt use any o365 services and used libreoffice on our laptops. We only switched to 365 so our devs can have easier meetings via teams with our clients and to have outlook. We still use our on prem email server

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Foosec@reddit

Yes, we prefer to use onlyoffice but outside factors sometimes don't allow it, so 365 licenses are given on a need to basis.

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wrootlt@reddit

We use Libre in some environments where we can't install O365 due to licensing and Online web version is not enough. Someone also recently requested Libre because its database (Access) app had support for something that MS didn't. But it is a niche. Only dozen or so use it out of thousands. I remember many years ago on another job i used to have Libre installed along with MS Office to be able to open and fix some weird Excel files (i think it was exported from some system and MS Excel would crash with them) :)

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StarSlayerX@reddit

Really hard to say no to $6 a month per user for M365 essentials. The only thing that can beat that is some bullshit pop3 service and LibreOffice.

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DarKuntu@reddit

I service some environments where I have deployed it for sales branches (super markets) and production offices (production worker). Not only because they use it in a very limited way, it reduces the attack surface and save some money. The typical administration office still of course gets MS office.

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