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Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

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Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#401

Post by mytailorisrich »

pjmlp wrote: post #394
wolvesechoes wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9/10 conversations on things happening across Europe can be thrown into trash bin, as they treat EU, or even Europe as a whole, as a single political entity. I could somehow accept that Americans can display such ignorance, but amazingly pretty often this mistake is being made by people declaring themselves as European. Like, are they blind to the political reality that surrounds them?

I can understand talking about us as a wide group, given how we share many cultural points of view, ways of working are still closer that across the pound, many being polyglot, having seen the same cartoons as kids and so on, regardless of the differences that remain, however we are still quite far away from turning into United States of Europe. The growing rights sentiment, is exactly because many nationals don't wa…

Cynically, my view is that this is actually on purpose and pushed by the EU itself. My is happening in with Russia, Ukraine, the US is used as a narrative tool to push for EU federalisation. This means pushing for more EU control, which we are seeing, and minimising references to individual countries. Even the "sovereignty" push is fully through the lens of more EU oversight (which is oxymoronic but a powerful political narrative).

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#402

Post by ExoticPearTree »

close04 wrote: post #399
andix wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switching from Word/Excel to LibreOffice is comparably easy. A lot of other Microsoft Products are much harder to get rid of. I've never seen a European corporation that doesn't do user management with ActiveDirectory. Some still have it on their own Windows servers, but most browser based applications still go through Entra (Azure Cloud based AD). Just shut off their Entra/AAD and most of their software is blocked b…

This is the elephant in the room that most comments on this page miss. Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder, but the real pain comes when you touch identity and access management. The usual initial optimism that "yeah but [insert solution name here] does this, problem solved" dissolves very fast as you start going through the inventory of requirements for managing users, devices, authentication, etc…

> Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder.

It actually depends how you use it. If you use the shared online collaboration features (concurrent editing for example) it might be pretty hard since I do not know any other solution besides Google Workspace that can do that.

And Excel standalone I think is the hardest to replace if you have lots of macros with business logic inside them.

For Teams, as long as you use it for conferencing and chat (no file sharing or editing), you can replace it with Slack or whatever other solution might exist that has some feature parity.

IAM can stay MS, as it is a pretty battle tested solution on-prem and in the cloud. Or you move to something like Okta with a LDAP like backend where you manage users and groups.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#403

Post by andix »

close04 wrote: post #399
andix wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switching from Word/Excel to LibreOffice is comparably easy. A lot of other Microsoft Products are much harder to get rid of. I've never seen a European corporation that doesn't do user management with ActiveDirectory. Some still have it on their own Windows servers, but most browser based applications still go through Entra (Azure Cloud based AD). Just shut off their Entra/AAD and most of their software is blocked b…

This is the elephant in the room that most comments on this page miss. Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder, but the real pain comes when you touch identity and access management. The usual initial optimism that "yeah but [insert solution name here] does this, problem solved" dissolves very fast as you start going through the inventory of requirements for managing users, devices, authentication, etc…

Exactly. And if identity and access management is turned off, then nothing works anymore.

In the past there was a lot of Software directly installed to user's PCs and might have been authenticated without SSO. Also log in to a PC often works without identity management (cached credentials). But nowadays nearly everything is somehow in the browser and requires SSO.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#404

Post by andix »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #402
close04 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the elephant in the room that most comments on this page miss. Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder, but the real pain comes when you touch identity and access management. The usual initial optimism that "yeah but [insert solution name here] does this, problem solved" dissolves very fast as you start going through the inventory of requirements for managing users, devices, authentication, etc…

> Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder. It actually depends how you use it. If you use the shared online collaboration features (concurrent editing for example) it might be pretty hard since I do not know any other solution besides Google Workspace that can do that. And Excel standalone I think is the hardest to replace if you have lots of macros with business logic inside them. For Teams, as long a…

> IAM can stay MS

The idea is to move critical parts away from US companies.

The US shows hostility towards Europe, even threatened a military attack. So the goal is now to remove as much dependence as possible.

To claim Microsoft is a company and doesn't have to follow US government order is naive. US government is now routinely breaking the law, if they threaten Europe with military action, they can also threaten Microsoft with military/police action.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#405

Post by close04 »

flopsamjetsam wrote: post #355
Mashimo wrote: post #15

I work in software development for Danish hospitals, and some regions already used OpenOffice, now libre office, for .. well over 15 years. At least in parts. We integrate with an API into libreoffice, and it more or less did not change in well over a decade. But sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why. There are just no logs. It feels like a black box at times. But I don't think they will be switc…

> But I don't think they will be switching away from Teams as quickly. I'm interested to know why Teams is so sticky for the team. Are there not good replacements available? I've used it a little, but am by no means a power user.

On top of what sibling comment says, Teams benefits from other network effects. If all your partners use Teams and the federation is a enabled, next time you consider a replacement that can do all of this, the bar will be that much higher to find a suitable alternative.

If an inter-operable protocols were enforced by some regulation it would alleviate the situation a bit.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#406

Post by close04 »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #402
close04 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the elephant in the room that most comments on this page miss. Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder, but the real pain comes when you touch identity and access management. The usual initial optimism that "yeah but [insert solution name here] does this, problem solved" dissolves very fast as you start going through the inventory of requirements for managing users, devices, authentication, etc…

> Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder. It actually depends how you use it. If you use the shared online collaboration features (concurrent editing for example) it might be pretty hard since I do not know any other solution besides Google Workspace that can do that. And Excel standalone I think is the hardest to replace if you have lots of macros with business logic inside them. For Teams, as long a…

> IAM can stay MS

That's leaving the most critical component still with a US company. Doesn't fly if the goal is what the Danish agency is trying to achieve.

> It actually depends how you use it.

Obviously but the larger the company, the more ways to use it, and one of those ways will be a nightmare to tackle. You want one solution, not a patchwork. So the one that does everything gets picked. MS throws everything and the kitchen sink in their ecosystem to fit every need even if sometimes at mediocre or crappy quality.

> For Teams, as long as you use it for conferencing and chat (no file sharing or editing), you can replace it with Slack

Taken in isolation you're right. But in a world of network effects every company, supplier, service provider you work with might use Teams and you can federate. Switch to Slack alone and you make your life harder.

I mentioned this in another comment, if protocols and formats were mandated to be open or interoperable (in practice) to allow usage in the public sector, replacing MS would be a notch or 2 simpler.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#407

Post by ExoticPearTree »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #401
pjmlp wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand talking about us as a wide group, given how we share many cultural points of view, ways of working are still closer that across the pound, many being polyglot, having seen the same cartoons as kids and so on, regardless of the differences that remain, however we are still quite far away from turning into United States of Europe. The growing rights sentiment, is exactly because many nationals don't wa…

Cynically, my view is that this is actually on purpose and pushed by the EU itself. My is happening in with Russia, Ukraine, the US is used as a narrative tool to push for EU federalisation. This means pushing for more EU control, which we are seeing, and minimising references to individual countries. Even the "sovereignty" push is fully through the lens of more EU oversight (which is oxymoronic but a powerful politi…

I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon. First thing the EU is that it needs to be reformed from the ground up and have elections for the general commissioner and its cabinet. Commissioner positions should be handed over to every country just because. The whole of Europe should vote who they want for agriculture, who they want for foreign relations and so on. The way it works now is very very wrong and a big disservice to EU citizens.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#408

Post by trinsic2 »

buovjaga wrote: post #286
Mashimo wrote: post #15

I work in software development for Danish hospitals, and some regions already used OpenOffice, now libre office, for .. well over 15 years. At least in parts. We integrate with an API into libreoffice, and it more or less did not change in well over a decade. But sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why. There are just no logs. It feels like a black box at times. But I don't think they will be switc…

LibreOffice release builds should offer to send a crash report. Ideally, you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report. Besides that, you can do your own build with debug symbols and get backtraces or debug the program. At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me know, if your organisation needs help: ilmari.lauhaka…

Why does libreoffice have such an annoying document recovery mechanism that I can't turn off or modify? It takes like three clicks to cancel that process every time I open a new doc

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#409

Post by trinsic2 »

Mashimo wrote: post #15

I work in software development for Danish hospitals, and some regions already used OpenOffice, now libre office, for .. well over 15 years. At least in parts. We integrate with an API into libreoffice, and it more or less did not change in well over a decade. But sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why. There are just no logs. It feels like a black box at times. But I don't think they will be switc…

Did you try running Libra office from command line to see the console output?

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#410

Post by trinsic2 »

deanc wrote: post #76
Mashimo wrote: post #15

I work in software development for Danish hospitals, and some regions already used OpenOffice, now libre office, for .. well over 15 years. At least in parts. We integrate with an API into libreoffice, and it more or less did not change in well over a decade. But sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why. There are just no logs. It feels like a black box at times. But I don't think they will be switc…

I think if we're to move to away from these US products to open source ones, then governments should also provide resources or funding to develop them using the licensing fees they save. Is the Danish government contributing back to libreoffice?

Agreed. There should be some structure setup for open source projects to request contribution fees. Having stuff like this in plain sight might help orgs play nice.
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