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France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

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Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#391

Post by tedggh »

dijit wrote: post #188
tedggh wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by i…

"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988? Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people…

I have used at least Skype, Meet/Chat, Slack, Teams and Discord, plus some other niche apps I can’t remember. In Discord, I like the ability to share user screens concurrently and the way you can just jump on a channel and have an impromptu meeting without much ceremony. But I have seen only one case of Discord in a corporate environment. My use cases are simple, video calls, screen sharing, file sharing and chat with mentions and code snippets, once in a while a survey to pick a place for lunch. I have been using Teams daily since last October. No issues. If it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already. People I work with value their time. Also last week I was in a 2K+ people presentation with Q&A. I haven’t experienced most of the issues you mentioned, and don’t have the use case for some, like search or mobile. I use my email as my source of truth for communications, if it’s not in my inbox it didn’t happen. We are very diligent in keeping meeting minutes and transcripts which are shared my email at the end of the each call.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#392

Post by distances »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #312
pelagicAustral wrote: post #2

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without havin…

Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that.

Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#393

Post by xanthor »

GaelFG wrote: post #114
wateralien wrote: post #62

Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?

Nextcloud is great !

Nextcloud is not great, it's just the only available package that approximates an all-in-one GSuite experience. In practice, the UI is really janky and unpolished.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#394

Post by [deleted] »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #359
pkulak wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix has done a bunch of work with the French government in the past. Hopefully they can capitalize on this sentiment.

More information here: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-gover... (0ct 2025) Interestingly, there is also a NATO-Matrix app: https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato

[deleted]

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#395

Post by KPGv2 »

dfex wrote: post #335
Arathorn wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tchap (the chat part of the suite) is indeed a fork of Element. Unfortunately they haven't funded upstream development for many years (otherwise both Element and Tchap would be much much better!) Visio (aka meet) began in parallel with Element's work on MatrixRTC and Element Call. Hopefully the two can converge, given they are both built on LiveKit.

It boggles the mind as to why they choose a name for this application that is very clearly a Microsoft trademark. In understand it's also the French word for Videoconferencing, but even still...

If French trademark law is even remotely close to US trademark law, it can't be applied to videoconferencing because you can't apply a trademark that is just the term for the category of product that is covered.

So for example, I can't trademark "Apple" for my apple orchard. But I can trademark it for my computer company. Similarly, MS likely has chart visualization tools covered by "Visio" in France, but not telecommunications software.

Trademarks aren't granted to a company for unrestricted use. They're granted for specific use. Like I can't found a computer company, get Apple trademarked, and then buy an orchard, use Apple for the orchard, and then sue every apple orchard for saying "XYZ Apples" in their name. It remains restricted to a specific use that was included in the initial application for TM.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#396

Post by scottyah »

sirwitti wrote: post #222
quadrifoliate wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent...Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users. Sure, but can you be honest and admit…

You're missing Signal which has gained a lot of traction in the last years. Apart from that it's hard to take statements from such an ignorant US centristic point of view about what europe is/has/has not seriously. Let's see how things will play out for europe and how our souvereignty efforts will impact the US economy.

Signal is also USA developed and funded, not sure why you're bringing that up?

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#397

Post by scottyah »

pyuser583 wrote: post #381

What does Europe imagine their relationship with Silicon Valley looking like? I'm looking for examples here - Israel has a very specific relationship with the tech sector, as does Taiwan, China, South Korea, etc. Even within the US, North Virginia, Huntsville, and Manhattan have specific relationships with Silicon Valley. Is the idea to copy Silicon Valley's stuff into government sponsored, "to committed to fail" ope…

Airbus has been the most successful example I know of. Basically, clone off and slightly modify something another country has created, then force a large population to use it. It's like tariffs on steroids.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#398

Post by cadamsdotcom »

This is SO exciting to see!

One analogy to our current moment in software is to think of skyscrapers in cities. In the early days of skyscraper construction, most knowledge needed to build one was concentrated in Chicago and New York, so those were the only places really building serious skyscrapers. It took a while but eventually the knowledge diffused out into the industry and the world.

Now we take for granted that high quality skyscrapers are in every city, with the tremendous space efficiency they give.

So is the same diffusion happening to software? It really looks like it! Knowledge of building and operating large-scale software seems to have reached a point where countries and companies no longer need to rely on Silicon Valley companies (and Microsoft) for software. (Note this is less about location and more about capability level, the skyscrapers/cities analogy breaks a little there)

Anyway every country and company can now build its own complex software. It’s been like this for a bit, but current US circumstances did the world a favor when it nudged Europe to get serious.

Software is headed for an exciting and multi-color future and I’m so here for it.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#399

Post by p_ing »

znhll wrote: post #367
dylan604 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an MS dev type, but I've often seen these forms questions. What made their forms so easy, or more in general what is so complicated about forms that this was even a tool so many liked?

MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...: * You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was) * You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records * You add a "form" for users to do just…

Access is an FE for db — JET Red, specifically.

JET Blue aka ESE is currently used by products like Active Directory and Exchange.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#400

Post by morshu9001 »

input_sh wrote: post #167

Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit). Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suit…

Is there not a FOSS solution like this already that they could just deploy?
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