Live data from Hacker News

German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

techgenix.com

11–20 of 117 posts

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#11
post #2

Meanwhile, Polish gov't uses Microsoft Teams [1] as one of ways of verifying citizens who are applying for trusted profile service. [1] - https://moj.gov.pl/uslugi/engine/ng/index?xFormsAppName=Wnio... (in Polish)

In Spain they use Zoom for the same thing.

It's really astonishing how governments, especially the European ones, don't cluster on open-source and self-hosted resources for all of these things. To be honest, I know the "easy answer" to this: "IT consulting firms, incompetence, bureaucracy and corruption", but even with that, it should be possible to do it with open system and not just rely on some other countries even for the software.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#12
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the teams hate. I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence

I don't know what the experience is like on Windows, but on other platforms it barely works. Super buggy. Super flakey. Super slow. The audio in conferencing also renders it unusable.

It's also quantitatively worse than the alternatives in every meaningful way.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#13
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, Polish gov't uses Microsoft Teams [1] as one of ways of verifying citizens who are applying for trusted profile service. Preface: Teams is horrible and it's super bloated for a simple chat app, but it's a mainstay for remote work along Slack and Zoom unfortunately. It's still better than the architecture using ID.me they built for unemployment benefits during COVID which in FL was subsequently hacked and…

Why the teams hate. I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence

In Firefox it is not a conferencing tool

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#15
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, Polish gov't uses Microsoft Teams [1] as one of ways of verifying citizens who are applying for trusted profile service. Preface: Teams is horrible and it's super bloated for a simple chat app, but it's a mainstay for remote work along Slack and Zoom unfortunately. It's still better than the architecture using ID.me they built for unemployment benefits during COVID which in FL was subsequently hacked and…

Why the teams hate. I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence

Audio quality is very poor by default (you can switch in better with a setting).

Uses a lot of memory and is slow

Frequently crashes my machine

The UI for discussions I find poor. No one uses the "teams" concept and everything is done in private chats.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#16
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the teams hate. I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence

I don't know what the experience is like on Windows, but on other platforms it barely works. Super buggy. Super flakey. Super slow. The audio in conferencing also renders it unusable.

Takes 520 MB right now for sitting idling in the background. That's how well it runs on Windows...

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#17
post #2

Meanwhile, Polish gov't uses Microsoft Teams [1] as one of ways of verifying citizens who are applying for trusted profile service. [1] - https://moj.gov.pl/uslugi/engine/ng/index?xFormsAppName=Wnio... (in Polish)

In Spain they use Zoom for the same thing. It's really astonishing how governments, especially the European ones, don't cluster on open-source and self-hosted resources for all of these things. To be honest, I know the "easy answer" to this: "IT consulting firms, incompetence, bureaucracy and corruption", but even with that, it should be possible to do it with open system and not just rely on some other countries eve…

Neoliberalism is super entrenched here. It is almost impossible to create a state/county/municipal IT department that would actually have enough sysadmins. All such departments rely almost entirely on external suppliers. One way this happens are salary controls. It is impossible to hire someone and give him the market rate, but it is trivial to tender the work associated with such position to a random external company for thrice the market wage.

This effectively means that the critical advantage of FLOSS - just install it and see if it works for the users - is effectively killed by the red tape. Only software that someone actively sells can ever make it through.

EDIT:

And to be clear, this is not about customer support and whatnot. Number one complaint from most of the public servants who contract out IT services have been that the suppliers are not helping them, are overcharging them and in some instances they even threaten and withhold documentation and read access to their software databases.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#18
post #3

The state of Hesse, not Germany. Data protection is overseen by the states, not the federal government.

True. However, the situation is not limited to Hesse, but also data protection officers in Rhineland Palladia made the same call: https://www.heise.de/news/Rheinland-Pfalz-Schulen-duerfen-Mi...

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#19
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, Polish gov't uses Microsoft Teams [1] as one of ways of verifying citizens who are applying for trusted profile service. Preface: Teams is horrible and it's super bloated for a simple chat app, but it's a mainstay for remote work along Slack and Zoom unfortunately. It's still better than the architecture using ID.me they built for unemployment benefits during COVID which in FL was subsequently hacked and…

Why the teams hate. I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence

> the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence

What does this mean?

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#20
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the experience is like on Windows, but on other platforms it barely works. Super buggy. Super flakey. Super slow. The audio in conferencing also renders it unusable.

Takes 520 MB right now for sitting idling in the background. That's how well it runs on Windows...

That's 6.5 % of available memory of a computer with 8 GB of RAM.
Post reply on HN