Re: [xwiki-users] XOffice not downloading pages, missing attachments
Hi, Paul, IMHO, from one side Xoffice - great tool, from other - it's almost useless: - MS Word is not the only editor in the PC world - MS Word is relatively "heavy" application. - Installation process is far from seamless - huge headache for people "who have almost no free time and are not interested in learning yet another program". They will have to spend 10 times more time on installing it, than on mastering WYSIWYG editor. Just try it on 10 users, you will see the difference :-) - Localization (here I mean cyrillic names) Much more versatile tool - web browser. " Everyone we talked to about editing a wiki document via the web interface was simply not interested." When human has choice to learn or skip learning with the same final result, usually choice is obvious. Nobody ever will find browser more useful, then MS Word, until you will close MS Word option forever. That's human. Meanwhile each and every user wil find it more useful for them, then "old-styled-word" editing. So, in this case - CHOICE is bad thing to move forward. Try it on regular users and you will feel it yourself. Last century people mastered MS Word, this century people found it extrafeatured, simplified as much as possible editing process and made wiki-cloud based systems default for document workflow. So, for more or less big projects: Windows and Word purchase looks insane versus open source OS + web browser. As I understand, it's the only reason, why other project do not such tools (like XOffice). I do have MS Word on my Windows 7 machine, but I don't remember when I used it last time to EDIT documents. ;) As for me, XWiki has one of the best in class web-based WISIWYG editor and all known for me users found it easy to use: NO NEED to dig into XWiki Syntax AT ALL. Just try other solutions to compare. "The killer feature is that normal users can create a document and copy-paste screenshots into a wiki document." This really has sence to implement into WISYWIG editor, but don't think it's a primary necessity. For me, for example, more critical - less complicated mechanism of anchor management. Probably, these reasons are slowly pushing Xoffice aside of mainstream. Kind regards. Dmitry Bakbardin 24 октября 2011, 18:36 от Paul Harris <harris.pc@gmail.com>:
The killer feature is that normal users can create a document and copy-paste screenshots into a wiki document. That cannot be done with (almost) any web wiki editor I can find at present.
Every person we showed it to loved it, and was willing to try editing a document on the wiki. Everyone we talked to about editing a wiki document via the web interface was simply not interested. We work with people who have almost no free time and are not interested in learning yet another program (ie web-wiki)... They know MS Word well, they are already read to write content.
I don't understand why you aren't pushing this simple but powerful component more. I don't see it mentioned on wikipedia, or wikimatrix. I think if you made sure xoffice worked, and let people know it existed, then more people would use xwiki. Its a killer feature and I don't understand why its not on billboards on the sides of freeways.
Regards, Paul
On 24 October 2011 20:35, Florin Ciubotaru <florin.ciubotaru@xwiki.com>wrote:
Hi,
If you didn't start your documentation yet and you don't have any legacy documents, I'd recommend using a pure web solution like XWiki. If you use MS Office for advanced content, you will have issues pushing that content to the wiki anyway. I created XOffice a few years ago, when MS Office was a lot more dominant and web editors were still weak(including the one used by XWiki), but the situation is quite different now.
Indeed there was no development on it for the past year. If you have critical issues with XOffice, it may be one of the following: - you are using a localized version of Office or Windows (there are older known issues with those) - there is a conflict with newer XWiki versions.
The MS Office and Windows behavior and security settings are different for versions released on other languages. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's the way it is. I've been receiving quite a few requests for a new release. However I could only do some bug fixing only for the En/En environment, since it's a pain to test and fix other versions.
Thanks, Florin Ciubotau
On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Vincent Massol <vincent@massol.net> wrote:
Hi Paul,
Indeed nobody is actively working on it at the moment and I was about to send a mail this week to propose to retire it and move it to the contrib repository since nobody in the xwiki committers are active on it and we want to keep a good quality on the software that we make available.
The only alternative would be someone stepping up and willing to work on it and ensure it works with latest XWiki Enterprise versions. See that we have nobody active on it, we could throw a vote to grandfather that person as an XOffice committer so that he/she can easily work on it.
Since you already fixed some bugs on it maybe you'd be interested to help out?
Thanks a lot -Vincent
On Oct 24, 2011, at 6:10 AM, Paul Harris wrote:
Hi all,
I personally fixed a few bugs in xoffice at the start of the year, which was released in XOffice 1.1. That was a long time ago, and we have not been using xoffice in the meantime (not building documentation yet). Now it is time to use it, and I'm having a lot of trouble.
I would post a bug to JIRA if it were a single problem, but it appears that xoffice is fundamentally broken as I can't go longer than 30 seconds without hitting a road block. Does anyone use it?
* For some pages with images, when I click Edit, the text appears with blank boxes for the images.
* I am able to do the following: I edit a text-only page, and copy-paste in an image, then click Publish. Stop and restart Word, and it is able to Edit the page WITH THE IMAGE correctly. Seems strange that it works for this page, but not the other.
* Some pages cannot be edited. I click Edit and it either doesn't seem to hear the button click, OR it will pop up "Opening page..." progress dialog, which never disappears.
These are serious roadblock bugs, am I the only one seeing this, or is this so buggy that noone else is using it regularly?
This is version 1.1 (released early 2011), with Word 2010, on Vista, freshly installed with not much else on the laptop.
thanks Paul
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On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 11:46:03PM +0400, Haru Mamburu wrote:
Hi, Paul,
IMHO, from one side Xoffice - great tool, from other - it's almost useless: - MS Word is not the only editor in the PC world - MS Word is relatively "heavy" application. - Installation process is far from seamless - huge headache for people "who have almost no free time and are not interested in learning yet another program". They will have to spend 10 times more time on installing it, than on mastering WYSIWYG editor. Just try it on 10 users, you will see the difference :-) - Localization (here I mean cyrillic names)
Much more versatile tool - web browser.
" Everyone we talked to about editing a wiki document via the web interface was simply not interested."
When human has choice to learn or skip learning with the same final result, usually choice is obvious. Nobody ever will find browser more useful, then MS Word, until you will close MS Word option forever. That's human. Meanwhile each and every user wil find it more useful for them, then "old-styled-word" editing. So, in this case - CHOICE is bad thing to move forward. Try it on regular users and you will feel it yourself.
Last century people mastered MS Word, this century people found it extrafeatured, simplified as much as possible editing process and made wiki-cloud based systems default for document workflow. So, for more or less big projects: Windows and Word purchase looks insane versus open source OS + web browser. As I understand, it's the only reason, why other project do not such tools (like XOffice). I do have MS Word on my Windows 7 machine, but I don't remember when I used it last time to EDIT documents. ;)
As for me, XWiki has one of the best in class web-based WISIWYG editor and all known for me users found it easy to use: NO NEED to dig into XWiki Syntax AT ALL. Just try other solutions to compare.
"The killer feature is that normal users can create a document and copy-paste screenshots into a wiki document."
This really has sence to implement into WISYWIG editor, but don't think it's a primary necessity. For me, for example, more critical - less complicated mechanism of anchor management.
Probably, these reasons are slowly pushing Xoffice aside of mainstream.
Kind regards.
Dmitry Bakbardin
I often assist with upgrades in professional offices. Every single person in those offices uses MSOffice as the primary office tool. That is the Enterprise class operations world. You don't tell them to change operations. You either seamlessly integrate with existing operations or... you don't even get a foot in the door. The idea that I could have a means of working seamlessly with various office teams on documents held on a wiki was a killer app that truly made XWiki appear to deserve the title "Enterprise". Without that feature... not so much. In fact, probably not worth the trouble of switching away from MoinMoin which is debian packaged and more or less standard already. Perhaps this is a bit off the technology which most here wish to discuss. But if you truly want to be Enterprise, then you have to think business operations in companies with staffs larger than some small countries and where costs of roll out of 'new' applications takes months and includes training budgets alone could be in the millions of dollars. The word 'Enterprise' requires a totally different, utterly conservative, bottom line 'it just works invisbily with the existing staff, procedures and infrastructure' attitude.
I must say I agree with Dale, here we still use mainly MSWord for nearly all documentation writing, and PDF exports. XOffice was feeling the gap, and allowing us to introduce XWiki in the existing process. Also, as a wiki (even xwiki) is not really bringing killer-features for the enterprise productivity (at least, it's difficult to promote this point of view to conservative users, not all enterprises are web 2 fanatics), it's really a pain to push them to use another editor than MSWord, and it is a risk for them as the whole chain (customers expectations for doc format, existing templates, usage of macros and properties ...) is intricated with msword ... That being said, as I can't contribute to it, if it must end I don't have a word :) -- View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/XOffice-not-downloading-pages-missing-atta... Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
participants (3)
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Dale Amon -
Haru Mamburu -
jerem