Using Linux At Work - Part 2 - Collaborating with people on other OSes

In this second part of my Linux at work series, we’ll go over how I managed to work with others in my company. Everyone there, apart from the developers, uses OS X, and Macs, so interacting with them might have been an issue.

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We use a zimbra based solution, which interfaces nicely with the elementary OS calendar and email apps through caldav / IMAP. The elementary OS calendar does take some time to show up appointments, and some recurrent appointments don’t seem to show up at all though, which prompts me to open the zimbra web app from time to time just to check.The default email app also doesn’t support email signatures, so I can’t add my own, and I also can’t create folders or labels, so it’s not optimal yet.

The main issue here, is that the contacts directory of our Zimbra server doesn’t seem to be exposed to elementary’s calendar, so, creating appointments, I need to type everyone’s email address manually.We also use Slack, Asana, and GitLab. All are available on the web, and as such, I use them in Firefox directly. I tried the slack app, but it’s just an electron wrapper, and uses tons of resources, so I uninstalled it, and kept a pinned tab in my browser instead, with notifications enabled.

I also tried to create webapps with epiphany for these various applications, but in the end, I found using them in the browser was much easier than to switch windows all the time, and less distracting as well.Generally, I tried to use Epiphany at work, but it’s just not well suited to my job: I need to test our website and web app on browsers most people use, so Firefox and Chrome are the main tools I need.

We exchange two kinds of documents; iWork documents, since everyone uses Macs, and Office documents. Our Office documents are perfectly editable in LibreOffice, without issues. I could even modify PDFs using LibreOffice Draw, which is great. Excel spreadsheets and word documents open nicely and work great. If I run into an issue LibreOffice can’t handle, I also use WPS Office, which has better compatibility.For iWork documents, I don’t have a native app solution.

No office suite I know of can open them, so I resort to using the online iCLoud.com portal, and open these documents there. It’s not ideal, and some features are missing, but most of the time, the edits I make are minor, so it’s not a big deal.Images, PDFs, a ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74yUjQM5uC8