I so understand why anybody would use Microsoft products anymore. You can do all that and more with Linux and SaaS products that works in browser.
German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools
111–117 of 117 posts
Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools
#112At the beginning of the pandemic Microsoft Teams was practically forced on everyone with children in Bavaria. With practically forced I mean you could either sign a document to get Teams for free or your child could not participate in online classes. A whole age group of children whose first online experience is Microsoft. In my opinion we should start there: Instead of unrealistic bans that no one will ever enforce…
The problem is those free and open-source tools may simply stop existing and all the skills the students learned with those programs could become completely useless. Germany, somehow, is a decade behind most of the other Western industrial powerhouses in terms of digitizing. I think the constant flux and reluctance to just move on is holding them back.
The opposite is the case.
Commercial software has a higher risk of becoming unavailable, because of missing licenses, acquisitions, insolvencies and other things that simply do not affect FOSS.
I have been using Audacity, Gimp, OpenOffice / LibreOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox for many years now and I don't see them disappearing anytime soon.
> I think the constant flux and reluctance to just move on is holding them back.
The reasons are not FOSS or privacy, but underinvestment and incompetence.
Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools
#113I wonder how many Billions or Trillions the GDPR costs European companies. Pretty much every company has to fight with it. Hire lawyers, change software, implement "cookie banners" etc. The craziest part is that the GDPR has a competitive disadvantage for European companies built in: European companies have to show cookie banners even for users outside of the EU. While non-European companies only have to do so for us…
> I wonder how many Billions or Trillions environmental protection costs companies.
> Pretty much every company has to fight with it. Hire lawyers, change machines, implement "dangerous waste disposal" etc.
> The craziest part is that environmental protection has a competitive disadvantage for companies built in: Companies have to demonstrate their pollution prevention even for users outside of the EU. While non-European companies only have to do so for users in the EU.
Analogy aside, no company has to show any banners, you just have to respect your users rights to privacy. All companies may use as many cookies as they want as long as they're strictly necessary for the sites operation.
Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools
#114At the beginning of the pandemic Microsoft Teams was practically forced on everyone with children in Bavaria. With practically forced I mean you could either sign a document to get Teams for free or your child could not participate in online classes. A whole age group of children whose first online experience is Microsoft. In my opinion we should start there: Instead of unrealistic bans that no one will ever enforce…
From what I've read at that time here in Poland, the services weren't the problem - teachers either had a free hand in picking the platform to communicate or were told by local gov't which one to use. The problem was with some kids being able to attend this quickly deployed "cloud-run pandemic school" in first place. There were reports about the poorest families who couldn't afford a computer, whose kids had to attend class via phones or were simply called and instructed by their teachers about the curriculum. But that was eventually solved with schools renting machines and later with hybrid classes, which tried to give kids a substitute for normality.
We had already running digital services for schools - there were already remote reports with parents or logbooks, live cameras previews (tho some argued about the privacy side of such idea) but nobody expected we'll need the full remote education that fast.
Son of friends used Google Classroom; I've read about kids joining their classmates on zoom, discord or even facebook messenger
Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the teams hate. I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence
Onboarding alone is enough for plenty of hate. What feels like half a dozen competing SSO systems trying to highjack the funnel, each of them gimped by two other internal Microsoft factions trying to shove in their upselling path. And of course with a Byzantine form flow through the full set of desktop client, OS-level Windows user identity management and multiple browsers (system default, Edge, and iirc occasionally…
Couldn't just use the join as guest in a browser mode?
Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools
#116I wonder how many Billions or Trillions the GDPR costs European companies. Pretty much every company has to fight with it. Hire lawyers, change software, implement "cookie banners" etc. The craziest part is that the GDPR has a competitive disadvantage for European companies built in: European companies have to show cookie banners even for users outside of the EU. While non-European companies only have to do so for us…
> I wonder how many Billions or Trillions environmental protection costs companies. > Pretty much every company has to fight with it. Hire lawyers, change machines, implement "dangerous waste disposal" etc. > The craziest part is that environmental protection has a competitive disadvantage for companies built in: Companies have to demonstrate their pollution prevention even for users outside of the EU. While non-Euro…
I know a bunch of startups and they all struggle with the GDPR. None has any issues with environmental protection.
"just have to respect your users rights to privacy" is easier said than done. I don't know a single startup that can say for sure they are GDPR compliant. It's not just "don't use Google fonts". It's really hard questions like "Do we have to replace all our non-EU infrastructure like our CDN, our payment provider, the SaaS services we use with new infrastructure ran by companies in the EU? How do we find those? Do they even exist? Do they work well for non-EU users? Are they compliant? How do we check?".
Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're talking about O365 as a whole, not just Teams. Chat in general is a bad example, because it's a product far more in flux and pretty easily replicated/replaced. Show me how not learning Excel is beneficial. Excel is one of the most important programs on Earth, and students should suffer by not learning it...and instead learn LibreOffice? Then they go to their jobs as adults and don't know how to use what most ev…
Even within the very well-worn "core" products of the MS office ecosystem: huge UI design changes de-skill millions of workers. they're not optional. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/find-commands-easily-in-word-20... I can easily imagine a world where other office apps are shutdown, you have the golden children like Excel, Word, Outlook and Powerpoint. Which change UI and design language or change features over the year…
Meanwhile, my 500-person company switches from MS Office to Google Docs like it's no big deal. Because it isn't. Excel isn't the main skill, using spreadsheets is. Formulas, tabs, references, filters, sorting, pivot tables, scripting, blah blah blah.
Apart from Excel specialists with highly specialized workflows when the rest of your finance department is also using the same, nobody cares whether you're good at Excel. They just want something to easily tabulate rows and columns of data and get some insight of out if. LibreOffice does that as much as Google and MS.
Don't put "LibreOffice" on your resume, put "spreadsheets" and 95% of the time it won't make an actual difference anyway. You can learn the location/naming of most relevant functions of your employer's preferred spreadsheet app in a matter of hours and then you know several tools, which is always better than just knowing a single one and puts you ahead in other ways.