Yeah office isn’t the what orgs care about losing with this change. Business premium was the lowest cost license option available to non-profits that allowed access to identity management using entra.
Identity and access management ensures that the right people, machines, and software components get access to the right resources at the right time. First, the person, machine, or software component proves they’re who or what they claim to be. Then, the person, machine, or software component is allowed or denied access to or use of certain resources.
So that’s what’s that called. Is that also what tracks who access what and when?
Yeah. Entra is basically the cloud version of Active Directory, it lets you use SAML to build single sign on systems that use your Microsoft account as the identity provider
And if you need it in a browser, there is Collabora, which exists as a paid business version with support or a free non-support version, that can easily be deployed with Nextcloud. Another alternative would be CryptPad.
If you also need your mails in your browser, there are multiple providers like mailbox.org that offer mail encryption even through the online mail interface.
Sometimes I find myself annoyed by Lemmy users. We love to tout foss alternatives, even when they don’t work as well, or aren’t nearly as polished.
Libre office is a different story, it has everything you’ll need, it’s really complete, it does everything you want and it can read any format you throw at it and save its output in any format you need. It launches faster than Microsoft office, it’s more stable, I really have absolutely no complaints, everyone should be using it.
Yeah that’s fair, I’ve seen how Office business integrates with the OS and a bunch of network services, so I’m not surprised by that. Well, for those corporate environments I expect MS will continue to be the norm. But for small businesses and home use, Libra is really fantastic.
And honestly, for personal use I could do without all that email and calendar integration, good riddance.
Edit: Also storage? MFA? MDM? Why would you want that in an office suite? like maybe MDM is useful, but it doesn’t belong in the office suite. And the rest of the acronyms I didn’t even recognize… So I’m guessing they also don’t really belong.
Oh no, I can see exactly why you’d want cloud storage in a business… But why as part of your office suite? If nothing else, it seems foolish to tie your storage solution to your office suite. It means your locking yourself into an ecosystem and reducing your options in the future.
Adding all these unrelated features is like saying “check it out! This car has a toaster oven!”. I mean, cool. And sure other cars don’t, so that’s something I guess, but why?
Why would you want multifactor authentication for your word documents? Hell, why do you need authentication? If you’re logged into the machine I think you get to use the word processor. But hey, if all this stuff really belongs in an office suite, why not throw in an aquarium screensaver, a cobal compiler and a drive formatter, that would really round the package out.
It’s not an office suite subscription. It’s basically a complete business productivity solution. M365 != Office. By your post it’s clear that you don’t understand the difference. The MFA for example is organisation wide, not for excel or word lol
M365 includes office, but it’s not just office. Office is one of the least important parts of it tbh. This is evident by the fact that some tiers don’t even include office.
It’s clear that most people in here bashing Microsoft over this don’t even know what M365 is and have never been in charge of any decision making for anything IT related in even a small business.
Those factors help drive MS office adoption. It’s a one stop shop. Many companies don’t want to bother with their own servers, they’d rather just buy a service.
Yeah it does. I’ll be honest, I don’t use spreadsheets much so I don’t have personal experience with it, but yeah it does support that.
I was curious, so I followed up on this. Here’s what a quick Google search turned up:
To open an XLSM file in LibreOffice Calc, you can generally open it directly. However, you might need to save it in a different format (like ODS) to ensure compatibility, especially if you’re dealing with macros. LibreOffice Basic is not directly compatible with Excel VBA macros, so you may need to rewrite the macros to use LibreOffice Basic.
In other words, you may need to save your Excel documents as open document files, but after that their macros should work just as they did. Either way, macros are supported and in fact there are a few different scripting languages you can use.
LibreOffice
And perfectly working software that covers whatever else MS365 offers, e.g. Thunderbird
I’d love for more people to change to Linux, but these are all (also) Windows software.
Yeah office isn’t the what orgs care about losing with this change. Business premium was the lowest cost license option available to non-profits that allowed access to identity management using entra.
That’s the real story here.
So that’s what’s that called. Is that also what tracks who access what and when?
Yeah. Entra is basically the cloud version of Active Directory, it lets you use SAML to build single sign on systems that use your Microsoft account as the identity provider
Not “basically” btw - entra is the azure/cloud version of AD. It was renamed.
It serves the same function , but comparing the two is kind of apples to oranges at this point
I’m just saying it literally is Azure AD renamed:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/identity/aad-rebrand/
And if you need it in a browser, there is Collabora, which exists as a paid business version with support or a free non-support version, that can easily be deployed with Nextcloud. Another alternative would be CryptPad.
If you also need your mails in your browser, there are multiple providers like mailbox.org that offer mail encryption even through the online mail interface.
Sometimes I find myself annoyed by Lemmy users. We love to tout foss alternatives, even when they don’t work as well, or aren’t nearly as polished.
Libre office is a different story, it has everything you’ll need, it’s really complete, it does everything you want and it can read any format you throw at it and save its output in any format you need. It launches faster than Microsoft office, it’s more stable, I really have absolutely no complaints, everyone should be using it.
Libre doesn’t support IDM, nor provide email, nor MFA, nor CAM, nor MDM, nor storage.
M365 Business Premium is a LOT more than Office Documents.
Yeah that’s fair, I’ve seen how Office business integrates with the OS and a bunch of network services, so I’m not surprised by that. Well, for those corporate environments I expect MS will continue to be the norm. But for small businesses and home use, Libra is really fantastic.
And honestly, for personal use I could do without all that email and calendar integration, good riddance.
Edit: Also storage? MFA? MDM? Why would you want that in an office suite? like maybe MDM is useful, but it doesn’t belong in the office suite. And the rest of the acronyms I didn’t even recognize… So I’m guessing they also don’t really belong.
Why would you want cloud storage for users in a business? Why would you want multifactor authentication for your users? Are you serious?
Oh no, I can see exactly why you’d want cloud storage in a business… But why as part of your office suite? If nothing else, it seems foolish to tie your storage solution to your office suite. It means your locking yourself into an ecosystem and reducing your options in the future.
Adding all these unrelated features is like saying “check it out! This car has a toaster oven!”. I mean, cool. And sure other cars don’t, so that’s something I guess, but why?
Why would you want multifactor authentication for your word documents? Hell, why do you need authentication? If you’re logged into the machine I think you get to use the word processor. But hey, if all this stuff really belongs in an office suite, why not throw in an aquarium screensaver, a cobal compiler and a drive formatter, that would really round the package out.
It’s not an office suite subscription. It’s basically a complete business productivity solution. M365 != Office. By your post it’s clear that you don’t understand the difference. The MFA for example is organisation wide, not for excel or word lol
M365 includes office, but it’s not just office. Office is one of the least important parts of it tbh. This is evident by the fact that some tiers don’t even include office.
It’s clear that most people in here bashing Microsoft over this don’t even know what M365 is and have never been in charge of any decision making for anything IT related in even a small business.
thy were talking about microsoft office. that provides neither of those
But this article and post are about M365 Business Premium licenses
Those factors help drive MS office adoption. It’s a one stop shop. Many companies don’t want to bother with their own servers, they’d rather just buy a service.
Microsoft 365 Business Basic gives you all this:
Plan highlights:
Identity and access management for up to 300 users
Web and mobile versions3 of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook
Custom business email (you@yourbusiness.com)
Chat, call, and video conference with Microsoft Teams
1 TB of cloud storage per employee
10+ additional apps for your business needs (including Microsoft Bookings, Planner, and Forms)
AI chat experience with web grounding, writing assistance, data analysis, and access to agents4
Automatic spam and malware filtering
Anytime phone and web support
LibreOffice gives you ………. 1 of those bullet points lol. Not really a like for like replacement is it?
Does it support macros?
Yeah it does. I’ll be honest, I don’t use spreadsheets much so I don’t have personal experience with it, but yeah it does support that.
I was curious, so I followed up on this. Here’s what a quick Google search turned up:
In other words, you may need to save your Excel documents as open document files, but after that their macros should work just as they did. Either way, macros are supported and in fact there are a few different scripting languages you can use.
GNOME Evolution is also a good outlook alternative and am pretty sure it was made as a open source alternative to outlook
Outlook alternatives are irrelevant when you don’t have your own email address. Microsoft 365 gives your company your corporate email.
Has it gotten a makeover yet? Last time I used it ~3 years ago it still looked like it was built in the early 90s.
It was functional, not a complaint about that. The super old design just got on my nerves.
Depends on the GTK theme ig?
I use evolution! It has some advantages over thunderbird but afaik it’s *nix only.
yeah the only downside
And if you need a more MS Office like feel: Use Softmaker.