5 ms·

Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less

by savant2 8mo ago

Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...

carefree-bob 8mo ago
For a traditional office suite, you'd want a word processor with somewhat of a decent layout engine in it, a spreadsheet, something for slide presentations, something for rudimentary databases/datasources, and some sort of diagram drawing capability, and all of these integrated together. By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc. So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc. One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality. That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram. Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it. I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio. I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.
mabedan 8mo ago
Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.
- savant2 8mo ago
  For layouts and opening docs from other suites, it seems they rely on OnlyOffice, as listed on the marketing page of their Google Drive equivalent [1]. OpenDesk from ZenDiS (German counterpart to this project, also collaborating on La Suite) seems to rely on Nextcloud and Collabora Online for that [2]. Collabora and OnlyOffice are also present in Lasuite Drive's development environment [3]. Docs and Drive aren't the only products in this suite: they also provide alternative for Meet, Chat, GMail or Sheets. I have no doubt that Microsoft and Google products offer more features but my point still stands: a lot of employees (like myself) need productivity tools but only need the core features. [1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk [3] https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b6d5c4bb79df417b36156d66d00d830/compose.yaml#L224 https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b6d5c4...
- smokel 8mo ago
  Work being done in offices is changing over time. I find myself writing less documents for printing and more for collaborating and sharing directly. Even though many formal processes still require printable PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at least not paper-centric.
  - virdev 8mo ago
    Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported. When you think of it it’s really bad for information security. On the plus side doing everything in the browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better real time collab and can include a lot more interactive content.
  - troebr 8mo ago
thayne 8mo ago
If you scroll a little further down, you'll see that it lists components of an office suite as: - a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation software This doesn't look like it has any of these
- ncallaway 8mo ago
  Have you considered that “office suite” has drifted in meaning since Microsoft Office was introduced and things like: - chat - video calls - notion Might now be more important to an office than word processing or presentation software?
  - virdev 8mo ago
    For sure
  - thayne 8mo ago
    Maybe those those things may be more important, depending on the office, but IME, that isn't what people usually mean when they say "office suite".
- sehansen 8mo ago
  It has two out of the three: - Word processor: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs - Spreadsheet: https://github.com/suitenumerique/calc https://github.com/suitenumerique/calc
busterarm 8mo ago
All _your_ needs at work. All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document formatting requirements. This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at some point. Every court system and government agency has their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with this for legal documents in MS Word.

by savant2 8mo ago

carefree-bob 8mo ago

For a traditional office suite, you'd want a word processor with somewhat of a decent layout engine in it, a spreadsheet, something for slide presentations, something for rudimentary databases/datasources, and some sort of diagram drawing capability, and all of these integrated together. By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc. So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc. One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality. That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram. Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it. I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio. I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.

mabedan 8mo ago

Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.

savant2 8mo ago
For layouts and opening docs from other suites, it seems they rely on OnlyOffice, as listed on the marketing page of their Google Drive equivalent [1]. OpenDesk from ZenDiS (German counterpart to this project, also collaborating on La Suite) seems to rely on Nextcloud and Collabora Online for that [2]. Collabora and OnlyOffice are also present in Lasuite Drive's development environment [3]. Docs and Drive aren't the only products in this suite: they also provide alternative for Meet, Chat, GMail or Sheets. I have no doubt that Microsoft and Google products offer more features but my point still stands: a lot of employees (like myself) need productivity tools but only need the core features. [1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk [3] https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b6d5c4bb79df417b36156d66d00d830/compose.yaml#L224 https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b6d5c4...
smokel 8mo ago
Work being done in offices is changing over time. I find myself writing less documents for printing and more for collaborating and sharing directly. Even though many formal processes still require printable PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at least not paper-centric.
- virdev 8mo ago
  Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported. When you think of it it’s really bad for information security. On the plus side doing everything in the browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better real time collab and can include a lot more interactive content.
- troebr 8mo ago

thayne 8mo ago

If you scroll a little further down, you'll see that it lists components of an office suite as: - a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation software This doesn't look like it has any of these

ncallaway 8mo ago
Have you considered that “office suite” has drifted in meaning since Microsoft Office was introduced and things like: - chat - video calls - notion Might now be more important to an office than word processing or presentation software?
- virdev 8mo ago
  For sure
- thayne 8mo ago
  Maybe those those things may be more important, depending on the office, but IME, that isn't what people usually mean when they say "office suite".
sehansen 8mo ago
It has two out of the three: - Word processor: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs - Spreadsheet: https://github.com/suitenumerique/calc https://github.com/suitenumerique/calc

busterarm 8mo ago

All _your_ needs at work. All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document formatting requirements. This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at some point. Every court system and government agency has their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with this for legal documents in MS Word.