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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

#21

Post by atonse »

tsimionescu wrote: post #18
jack_tripper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

At least in the US we started solving this by having high salaries for tech workers in government (see 18f and USDS, etc, both shut down by Trump), or UK's GDS which was a pioneer in this space.

If you want to attract good talent, there are successful models out there now, but you have to start by paying them way more than the average government salary. But the contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try to stop them every step of the way.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#22

Post by mk89 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #13
embedding-shape wrote: post #12

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…

I prefer Atos + a solid open source solution to "an own IT department that will ditch the battle tested open source solution because XYZ" and then 6 months later bugs rain from the sky with users' data searchable in google.

Opening up a whole department requires skills. If you don't have such skills, please hire the "parasite". I prefer that. At least they provide a service, overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in the business.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#24

Post by Ajedi32 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #18
jack_tripper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.

The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great outcome if greater awareness of this problem lead to more state resources being invested in open source alternatives to proprietary software.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#25

Post by mschild »

saubeidl wrote: post #15
giancarlostoro wrote: post #3

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

I applaud both efforts but openDesk is mainly aimed at governments and usually only implements 3rd party OSS.

Their file storage solution is Nextcloud, chat is element, etc.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#26

Post by zenmac »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #3

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.

>Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.

CryptPad just seems more secure compare to Nextcloud.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#27

Post by xhkkffbf »

josefritzishere wrote: post #19
troyvit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$7 per user. So if you have three people using the server, it becomes cheaper.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#28

Post by jack_tripper »

mk89 wrote: post #22
jack_tripper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I prefer Atos + a solid open source solution to "an own IT department that will ditch the battle tested open source solution because XYZ" and then 6 months later bugs rain from the sky with users' data searchable in google. Opening up a whole department requires skills. If you don't have such skills, please hire the "parasite". I prefer that. At least they provide a service, overpaid, ok, but they have at least some…

>overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in the business.

With all due respect, setting up a Nextcloud instance for a government entity is not really rocket science requiring a 150 IQ, Stanford grad, PhD, galaxy-brain labor force, but it's a skill that's easily abundant in Austrian and can be easily transferred to more of the tech labor pool to achieve the same results of what Atos did.

We're talking about a Nextcloud instance here, not building an entire hyperscaler from scratch, like AWS or Equinix, which is indeed a skill next to inexistent in most of Europe, which does indeed require contracting FAANG corps to build because we lack that capability in Europe.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#29

Post by gostsamo »

troyvit wrote: post #16
giancarlostoro wrote: post #3

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…

Hetzner offer managed next cloud for 5 euro with 1tb storage. 13 euro for 5tb.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#30

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #4

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…

I’m 100% confident and Microsoft installation would also have required working with a local reseller/contractor.

It would probably have been ATOS itself.

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