At a time of growing concern over the power of the world’s mighty tech companies, one German state is turning its back on US giant Microsoft.
In less than three months’ time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft’s ubiquitous programs at work.
Nice
Working with information today could be hundreds of times better if there were serious open standards. Switching away from outdated proprietary junk, to an open source version of that junk is great, but late. And, let’s hope, its the start of real change. To catch up to where we should have been decades ago if we hadn’t been held back by lazy MS et al. Digital information should zip between people and have real meaning. Not have to go through a thick layer of IT, and files and formats, and redundant copies, and silos and having to know tech to get things done. Peoples expectations are so low, they are satisfied with the crap we have today.
You’re way off here. Microsoft are the industry leaders in this space because they’re so far ahead of everyone else because they focus on this stuff. They’re far from lazy, they’re the opposite in fact. As someone who manages the whole MS suite from entra to dev ops all the way to managed instance dbs and defender and everything in between daily, their integration across everything and their pace of updates is insane.
What products specifically are you calling “outdated junk” and why?
I can also explain Microsoft’s straglehold on enterprise/government/institutional IT in two words: Group Policy. Nothing - absolutely nothing - from any other OS maker comes close to the granular level of configurability, customisation and flexibility that comes with Group Policy, not even ChromeOS or iOS.
hadn’t been held back by lazy MS et al.
MS is not lazy but working hard to maintain their lead.
Teams is just an incomprehensible version of Discord. What’s the open source version of that? Matrix?
Can anything be more incomprehensible that Discord?
Incomprehensible? How? It’s got team/channel chats, private chats, and meetings. What makes it stand out is, like everything else MS does, the integration across all their services.
It definitely needs some improvement, but “incomprehensible” it isn’t.
I would say “even busier” and “over-integrated” rather than “incomprehensible”.
Not to start a fight or anything, but it almost reminds me of emacs, because it’s like someone started with an idea for one kind of program, but they just kept adding and adding and adding to it. But emacs at least is free, flexible, long established, free, and quirky.
What was the alternative they chose ?
It doesn’t say, but seems to be an ad-hoc solution.
This process started in 2021 already.
They will use GNU/Linux, LibreOffice, Nextcloud, Open Xchange (OX), Thunderbird and Univention AD-Connector.
https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/digitalisierung/linux-plus1/Projekt
I’ve used them all pretty much and it’s a really shitty product
At my work all but me love microsoft. But … They started to complain about teams too. I only use the chat because it’s impossible to avoid.
My work hate Microsoft but don’t see a viable alternative. Microsoft is safer because of their stranglehold.
At mine the person in charge of IT procurement is an ex Microsoft salesman.
Literally no one I work with likes Teams but we keep using it because that’s just what we do. Other options basically don’t exist simply by virtue of being either not Microsoft or not overwhelmingly the market leader.
So you’re saying that other options do exist but some companies don’t want to use them because Microsoft is very popular, which is kind of a circular thing, and I understand, but it’s a sign of laziness, not quality.
I’m not sure why you’re taking a oppositional tone. To be clear I’m complaining, not trying to justify it.
I’m definitely in the minority, but i really never had or have any issues with Windows or Teams like everyone seems to complain so much about. With that said, I absolutely love that they are making this move. As someone who works in the area and sees the pricing and how much our company spends on Microsoft I find it appalling and absurd that anyone is willing to spend that much on licensing… I wish I could work on a project like this just to see what the savings could be overall.
The worst part for teams is if you do contact work and need to be a part of multiple teams instances… It’s a MASSIVE fucking pain. Microsoft’s login processes are absolute infuriating and even more so if you have to log in to multiple different accounts that all somehow have the same email address but different tenants without letting you know which account version is for which tenant.
We had to use slack for our internal stuff so we could always be in contact with each other because you could only be signed into one teams instance at a time without jumping through crazy hoops.
I initially wanted us to move to teams but that hurdle stopped us. I’m kinda glad in hindsight.
Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.
I get it! It’s a fucking terrible program. At the moment I’ve got two instances of it running, one old and one new. Why the fuck? Why doesn’t all the old things transfer to the new one?
It’s also a joke to maneuver. The different subjects have “hidden” subcategories that aren’t supposed to be hidden but are! So you have two extra clicks to find the folder… it’s a giant fucking joke that a company the size of MS can’t make this tolerable.
Channels get hidden when they’re inactive for a decent amount of time. To see them you just view all the channels in a team. Not really hard. Can also just then tick to always show it. This is a PICNIC situation.
I’m guessing your 2 instances are the personal one that is included with windows, and then the work one. You can’t have 2 instances of the same one installed.
Do you like work for Microsoft or something, you’re all over this post
It’s like I opened it and read the comments and replied to the ones that I was thought warranted a response. Crazy I know.
Is what I said wrong?
I’m stuck with Teams in my job.
I fucking hate it.
Any suggestions on alternatives?
Slack is ok but proprietary.
Element is a new and eg fractal doesn’t have threading.
It crashes, it loses things, it has a lousy search function, to automate messaging you need to learn one of the arcane and convoluted MS services because they deprecated the much easier webhooks…
When something fails (and it always does) we just say “Well… it’s Teams”, and that sums it up.
Same. I’ve come to terms using it in browser mode on Edge, same for Outlook. The desktop applications are so horrific, I uninstalled both. Half the time they wouldn’t work or force log me out.
Now I literally have a standalone screen that’s showing nothing but Edge with those two tabs on, and all my productive environment is on a nice large screen where I don’t have to see the crap.
You love to see it.
I took a look and its quite complicated to install requiring a very complex kubernates clustwr. Unclear why it is so disparate when something like nextcloud can be single containerised. I feel like this could be simplified for deployment.
I didn’t see what exactly they’re using for a Teams replacement?
Many are switching to Nextcloud Talk.
Open desk, is the office suite they use, I suppose. Matrix chat, perhaps?
It has an inbuilt messenger based on element, apparently.
Jup, Matrix indeed. Thx
I never understood how a huge government can’t be bothered to host their own nextcloud or whatever for a couple dozen mil per year instead of spending hundreds of millions per year on onedrive and other commercial crap.
Governments are usually inhabited by older folks, that aren’t too tech savvy.
Bribes, I’d venture.
Legal liability for when the service, inevitably, gets breached. If the government hosts it, they’re liable. If the vendor hosts it, the vendor is liable. Simple as money matters.
Spread responsibility thinly across as many organizations and departments within those organizations and across as many legal thresholds as you can to minimize blowback when something inevitably has to be held to account.
So they could just use a service offered by (checks notes) T-Systems, Siemens, Lufthansa Systems, SAP, TeamViewer AG,… what’s that? In all these years these companies were relying on US service providers as well, instead of innovating? Well that sucks.
YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP!
Yes, but only in Europe, and no Americans are allowed. 😕
Try and stop me. I don’t even have windows installed anymore.
do France next
Why would we uninstall France?
Why would we uninstall France?
🤔
German state hits uninstall on France
😅
Aren’t French authorities quite ahed on FOSS adoption in their platform? I.e. https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en
It’s a cooperation between France, Germany, and more recently The Netherlands.
even the most sensitive information are collected through Microsoft and government sites use adobe too 🤷 Windows is the OS in almost all government computers.
not to forget all the WhatsApp use for official communication
facebook and xitter accounts of most government offices are still active
