Hi,
Very interesting post and it really brings to mind several issues I'm currently dealing with as Fedora Workstation user that uses it at work (and at home and everywhere). Recently my organization moved over to Microsoft's Office 365 from Google Apps. That means going from Chrome with web apps to a bunch of desktop apps. Yes, Evolution and Pidgin/Empathy have what I would call "basic" support for Office 365 but it's not good enough yet where Fedora Workstation would really cover the majority of enterprise use-cases.
Most organizations and academic institutions are migrating to Office 365 as they reduce their in-house physical server count, consolidate licenses and go "to the cloud". These same organizations also have a large inventory of existing Windows desktops that could be turned into Fedora Workstations instead of taking the expensive route of buying Macs. There's a huge potential WIN here to provide major cost-savings to organizations and provide a cutting-edge Linux environment that will beat the poorly implement UNIX-like environment of Mac OS X.
Current pain points with Office 365 integration are:
1. Users should be able to do a one-step setup of Office 365 using GNOME Online Accounts and not have to configure Evolution and Pidgin/Empathy separately, this is too complicated for most users.
2. Empathy currently doesn't support enough features from Lync [1] - the Microsoft enterprise communication tool - and that's a show stopper. You can't do video calls, you can't initiate meetings and you can't do screen-sharing or file-transfers.
3. OneDrive isn't supported by documents and there's no way to sync documents or access documents directly from Nautilus. Seamless OneDrive support plus LibreOffice would be an awesome combination.
4. Evolution is missing some crucial Office features such as finding available meeting rooms and setting up Lync meetings. Also calendar sharing is a bit broken. People have shared calendars with me and I still couldn't access them.
5. OneNote [2] is the note-taking app in Office. Currently no known Linux app can edit these documents. It would be great to have an equivalent GNOME app that could import things like OneNote documents and then sync them to OneDrive.
The way I've worked around these problems is to run a Windows 7 VM and I consider it moving backwards not forwards.
This is why most developers and technology staff gravitate towards MacBooks, because despite having a rather dysfunctional and poorly hacked together UNIX environment it can run Microsoft apps and connect to enterprise services. Also, the problem isn't GNOME 3 and it's UI/UX, they're solving those problems and have made serious progress and the look of the desktop impresses most people I've encountered. The real problem is integration with enterprise services and that's the big challenge ahead for Workstation.
Hopefully you can make it a priority in forthcoming development cycles and overcome those challenges.
Thank you for everything you've done with Workstation thus far, it's great!
On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015>
There's a lot which is of interest here, but this jumped out at me:
http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech-os
Breakdown by OS:
* 58.3% Windows 7 & 8
* 21.5% OS X
* 20.5% Linux
Which is awesome and encouraging for desktop Linux. However, the
breakdown of distros (from 4667 responses) is:
* 12.0% Ubuntu
* 2.2% Debian
* 1.6% Mint
* 1.3% Fedora
* 4.0% Other
So... we've got some Room for Growth there. :)
Unfortuantely, Stack Exchange didn't ask distro version in previous
years, but this'll at least give us a number from here. (For OSes as a
whole, the shift seems to be entirely from Windows XP and 7 to Windows
8 — desktop Linux is basically flat and OS X gains a few percent over
the past two years.)
I wish they asked about deployment / target OS, too.
You can see some of the demographics further down the study — about a
third (32%) are full-stack web devs, 14% are students, 10% do back-end
web devs, 9% mobile, 8% desktop, 6% front-end web, and then enterprise
developers of various stripes at 2.9%.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Fedora Project Leader
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