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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

#71
post #37

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 wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/ ). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them.

...and the BRZ doesn't outsource most stuff? Just like the Magistrate's Dept. 1 (Vienna Digital) for state-level IT in the federal capitol? Or IT-Kommunal for municipal IT all over Austria?

As far as I'm concerned, all of these public sector ICT divisions are just a pile of contracts.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#72

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…

Calling NIS2 'upcoming' legislation at this point is as funny as it is sad.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#73

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.

https://nextcloud.com/office/ seems to be exactly that. Self hosting seems to consist of "set up nextcloud, set up collabora, click the integration button" https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-to-install-nextcloud-office/ Or just `sudo docker run --init --sig-proxy=false --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 80:80 --publish 8080:8080 --publish 8443:8443 --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/…

That’s not very secure, giving a :latest container access to the docker socket…

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#74

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.

Collaborative editing is very niche, and I highly doubt it's used in government work.

Very niche? That depends a lot on the culture (I use that daily).

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#75
post #71
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/ ). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them.

...and the BRZ doesn't outsource most stuff? Just like the Magistrate's Dept. 1 (Vienna Digital) for state-level IT in the federal capitol? Or IT-Kommunal for municipal IT all over Austria? As far as I'm concerned, all of these public sector ICT divisions are just a pile of contracts.

Yes of course. From the outside, I can’t tell to what extent and whether it’s being done sensibly, but there are projects where they are likely better off contracting them out, and others where there are benefits of keeping things in-house (e.g., involving subject matter experts with long involvement in some niche government area). My point was that such an organization already exists.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#77
post #75
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and the BRZ doesn't outsource most stuff? Just like the Magistrate's Dept. 1 (Vienna Digital) for state-level IT in the federal capitol? Or IT-Kommunal for municipal IT all over Austria? As far as I'm concerned, all of these public sector ICT divisions are just a pile of contracts.

Yes of course. From the outside, I can’t tell to what extent and whether it’s being done sensibly, but there are projects where they are likely better off contracting them out, and others where there are benefits of keeping things in-house (e.g., involving subject matter experts with long involvement in some niche government area). My point was that such an organization already exists.

At the time of writing, the BRZ has spent over 2.1 billion euros in public procurement contracts above the award threshhold. [1] This is not accounting for personell costs of their 1800 in-house employees.

[1] https://offenevergaben.at/auftraggeber/8983

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#78

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…

All this money saved should be "unsaved" until a decent alternative is made. Everything that the government should spent here, should be invested into pan-european organization to develop a new office suite. Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant. Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use. Everyone I proposed this to tried it an…

Libreoffice is fine, better than we deserve. If they want it to be even better, maybe instead of throwing a few hundred million at MS, they could throw a few hundred million at Libreoffice. It's old as hell and kept up by charity.

The idea that Libreoffice is so bad that giving up your freedom to Google or Microsoft is unavoidable just shows your actual level of objection to being slaves to US companies is close to zero. You'll only be pried away from your dependence on the latest popular versions of US products kicking, screaming, and complaining the entire time. You wouldn't be satisfied with anything but a clone, and you'd complain that the clone lacked the most obscure features of the real thing.

And it's not just you, but a typical sort of aimless ridicule of FOSS product from people who feel guilty about not using them when their professed politics say they should. You'll talk a big game about independence, but your fictional pan-European office suite is far worse than Libreoffice, seeing as it doesn't exist. Couldn't be more feature-light.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#79

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…

Microsoft isn't a product or service. Nextcloud is. They either replaced Microsoft with Atos, or they replaced Office365 with Nextcloud.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free. If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of…

oh it very much is. they just act and bill like it's not. corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery. for construction it's the exagerated foundation which they only actually deliver what's needed and pocket the difference. for software it is the hundreds of rewrites that may or may not have happened and are now in the past.

> corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery.

No, that is plain fraud. Corruption is paying so that no one notices or cares about the the costs that can't be justified after delivery.

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