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Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

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Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#11

Good, but this needs to happen on a much larger scale. These are "just" 1200 employees, but throughout Europe there are hundreds of millions of people working with Microsoft services and they all need to be torn out and replaced. >As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR…

I don't mind the reason being "the right reason" or not, getting rid of Microsoft will be a net-positive regardless.

And it's a process that will take years, and be step-by-step, you can't just "torn out and replace everything" in one go, not to mention how bad of an idea that would be regardless.

I'm happy we continue to do this step by step, making sure it's working alright and is the right thing along the way.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#12

Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos". I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian…

> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos.

From the article:

> The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements.

So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whatever they used Microsoft for, with NextCloud, the process which was executed by Atos.

That's how I understood it from the article at least. And I'm guessing more people are likely to have heard about NextCloud before while probably not heard about Atos before, unless you're Austrian. So for a web article, it makes sense to highlight what people might understand and recognize.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#13

Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos". I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian…

> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos. From the article: > The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements. So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whate…

>And I'm guessing more people are likely to have heard about NextCloud before while probably not heard about Atos before, unless you're Austrian

You don't need to be Austrian for that. Atos is a pretty infamous IT services provider that operates in all of Europe and has the same issues as all such service providers like Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro, IBM, NTT Data, etc, and so far I haven't see ONE SINGLE CASE where these clowns were involved in a government project and it didn't turn out to be an expensive, over-budget, delayed, shitshow leaving the taxpayers holding the bag.

Like for example Austria has a national highway company(ASFINAG) and national railway company(OEBB) where the government is majority shareholder and they work pretty damn good to serve the taxpayers and the users of those services whether they're Austrians or not.

So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites? It's 2025, when do we start treating IT infrastructure like road, rail, water, energy, healthcare etc already? How many decades more need to pass till the government realizes that the internet and associated services are also worthy of national importance and therefore ownership?

I'm not saying to nationalize the internet, on the contrary privatization and decentralization is better for consumers, but the digital interaction between taxpayer and government is something that should not be outsourced to the private sector, especially not to foreign publicly treaded companies like Atos, who have no skin in the local game and don't give a fuck if they leave an expensive mess behind as long as they can ride the gravy train while it lasts.

So excuse me if I have a high degree of skepticism when I hear about the involvement of the likes of Atos in taxpayer funded projects.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#14

Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.

I mean, has Microsoft? Last two places I've worked at are in the Office ecosystem and it's incredibly bad. I need to reconcile documents all the time like it's 2005, sharing takes 15 clicks (which is why it's a massive pain to get Sharepoint AI ready, since everyone just shares with all rather than specifying with who to specifically).

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#15

Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.

I'm not sure about Nextcloud, but the French government built a thing that looks pretty good: https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/

If you want a full suite, the German government has been working on integrating and packaging a whole open source productivity stack: https://www.opendesk.eu/en

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#16

Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.

I think it depends on the feature set you're looking for. My nextcloud instance is basically online OpenOffice apparently. It doesn't match Google Docs in speed, responsiveness, UI or UX, and it costs me like $18/month to run, but it seems relatively light-weight. There's no idiotic gemini crap or a pop-up begging me to try it though, and all my data is my own. I'm not the Austrian government but that's the feature set I was looking for.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I host a small server for family and it seems to work well: https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/

Is this light enough to run on a SBC (think of something with the power of a Raspberry Pi 3 or a bit more) with decent performance (for just 3-4 users)?

I was running it on an Odroid N2 for 2-3 years, and upgraded to a RK3588 Orange Pi something a couple of years ago. It's not fast but it's useable. At one point I succeded in making the collaborative editing working, but it stopped after updates. Maybe it needs more love than what I'm able to spare, but the feeling after years is that you have to accept some level of unreliability.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos. From the article: > The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements. So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whate…

>And I'm guessing more people are likely to have heard about NextCloud before while probably not heard about Atos before, unless you're Austrian You don't need to be Austrian for that. Atos is a pretty infamous IT services provider that operates in all of Europe and has the same issues as all such service providers like Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro, IBM, NTT Data, etc, and so far I haven't see ONE SINGLE CA…

So much this. It's absurd that in a world where every government interaction isoving online, we still ask every individual state institution to contract out the development and maintenance work to outside companies, instead of having a government IT provider.

The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#19
post #16

Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.

I think it depends on the feature set you're looking for. My nextcloud instance is basically online OpenOffice apparently. It doesn't match Google Docs in speed, responsiveness, UI or UX, and it costs me like $18/month to run, but it seems relatively light-weight. There's no idiotic gemini crap or a pop-up begging me to try it though, and all my data is my own. I'm not the Austrian government but that's the feature s…

The current Google workspace service is about $7 a month. I'd pay more to be rid of AI, it's a near-constant nuisance, and major privacy concern. But $18 seems steep to also be missing core features.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#20

Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos". I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian…

> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos. From the article: > The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements. So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whate…

It means absolutely nothing that they "worked alongside Nextcloud's team" – I worked with a big household consulting firm (who will remain nameless), for a common client who adopted Qualtrics. The firm was a Platinum Qualtrics partner (or whatever the highest tier was).

I had never used Qualtrics, and I had to help the team figure out all kinds of basic things on how to actually configure Qualtrics. And they (on paper) were the experts supposedly. Even our common client was a bit amused about the whole thing.

It was my first experience seeing how these big firms operate. At the end of the day, some poor 28 year old at Atos (or probably outsourced to another country) who spent a few days getting some Nextcloud certification is probably doing a lot of the work, rather than thinking you're getting the best of the best who know this stuff inside out.

Let's see how it goes. At the end of the day, I (like most people) want more competition in this space. If more people use LibreOffice, hopefully that results in more investment in the product. So I hope for positive outcomes.

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