- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
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.
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’m stuck with Teams in my job.
I fucking hate it.
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.
I want to say various cities/regions in Germany make statements like this every few years? And they usually end up rolling back when it becomes clear the cost to retrain both existing staff and new staff isn’t worth it.
That said: This gets the national security bump so maybe it will stick. Also nobody on the planet likes to use Teams.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The worst part for teams is if you do contract 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.
This seems to be the same article, but uses a URL that doesn’t lead to a page that is essentially blank for me: https://us.afpnews.com/article/?were-done-with-teams-german-state-hits-uninstall-on-microsoft,49PM3G2
Is that not literally the same link as the OP?
EDIT: Ah, the OP’s edit from 30 minutes before your comment has not federated out to your instance yet.
I currently see this URL provided by https://thebrainbin.org/u/@Pro@programming.dev and it is not identical: https://us.afpnews.com/article/?were-done-with-teams-german-state-hits-uninstall-on-microsoft%2C49PM3G2=
Hmm, I think this is an Mbin vs Lemmy issue. There are two differences in the URL:
- The broken URL has
%2C
instead of,
. This part does not make a difference, because that resolves to a comma anyway - The broken URL has
=
at the very end for some reason. This is what breaks it. Remove that character, and the URL works fine
The weird thing here is that the broken URL only ever shows up on Mbin. Below are a few different links to the comment in which you shared the broken URL. If you view the comment on your Mbin instance, it is indeed broken. But if you view it on this community’s Lemmy instance or my home instance, your same comment actually has the working URL. Something about how the post/comment were federated must have messed things up.
- https://programming.dev/post/32148095/17523722
- https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36630589/20713561
- https://thebrainbin.org/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/864885/We-re-done-with-Teams-German-state-hits-uninstall-on-Microsoft/comment/6706294#entry-comment-6706294
- The broken URL has
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.
That includes Windows, right?
…
Right?
…
It says they will be replaced soon, so im assuming it’s phase 2.
Nice
Teams is just an incomprehensible version of Discord. What’s the open source version of that? Matrix?
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.
Can anything be more incomprehensible that Discord?
deleted by creator
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?
It was barely tolerable, then they gated proper noise cancellation behind some AI privacy destroying BS. Excellent choice, fu Microsoft