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Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

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81–90 of 112 posts

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 z…

I disagree completely. If libre office would be fine, it would be popular. And, as said, most of the people I know avoid it like a plague.

Also, im not trying to ridicule FOSS as a whole. if anything I'm a financial supporter for several projects and organizations. It's not a lot of money, but it's every month. So, no, it's not this.

The proposal would be to fund something like collabora, build on top of libre office or do something greenfield, but all this money that was supposed to go to Microsoft should be redirected.

Decision that governments did are not based on the fact that libre office is good. It's based on 1) political reasons called digital sovereignty and 2) price. Maybe 3) being pissed at trump. They didn't do it because LO was good.

Some american products have no good alternatives, yet. Some do, like windows can be replaced with gnome, but mobile phones cannot. Probably you are not typing or reading this from a European os on your phone, yet alternatives exist. Just not good ones.

Microsoft Office clone is not what I want, but what I would accept. Let's say UI should be very similar to Microsoft Office or even better Google office. That's it. Make it in a desktop suite and we are all good.

But do not ignore the UI part of the app.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#82

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.

>Collaborative editing is very niche

I assure you that it is not. Every organization, public and private, beyond a certain size, has people whose entire day consists of collaboratively editing documents and spreadsheets. Responding to superiors who highlight a sentence and leave comments like "@Team can we tighten this up? Thx".

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#83
post #20

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…

It means absolutely nothing that they "worked alongside Nextcloud's team" – I worked with a big household consulting firm (who will remain nameless), for a common client who adopted Qualtrics. The firm was a Platinum Qualtrics partner (or whatever the highest tier was). I had never used Qualtrics, and I had to help the team figure out all kinds of basic things on how to actually configure Qualtrics. And they (on pape…

That's the thing with these service companies, they only hire when they get the contracts, so you can rarely expect engineers skilled and experienced with a product so many of them got introduced a few days/weeks before.

They usually merely serve as gatekeepers to the vendor support.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#84
post #43

Coming after the Austrian military ditched MS Office (365, Copilot, whatever it's called now) for LibreOffice [0]. Similar stuff going on in Denmark and to some extent in Germany [1]. Way to go! [0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-off... [1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source...

I do wonder whether a lot of Europe is starting to decouple from U.S. tech.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#85
post #76

I get the appeal of moving away from Microsoft, but in my experience, Nextcloud is extremely bloated even for personal self-hosting. I wonder how well it will scale in a government setup.

I think it also depend if you only use it to sync and share files or if you want to use the included web apps.

But to be honest office 365 also struggle at times when using the web version of the office tools. Last week I had to do reporting on a small excel document with 4 sheets, the biggest one having less than 30 lines and 6 column and every time I had to insert a line it took 5 to 10 seconds for that line to appear and the whole excel web app was unresponsive until it appeared.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#87

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 just want a OK spreadsheet experience I can use from the web, and host myself in my home. How does whatever Nextcloud offer for spreadsheets compare to Google Sheets?

As the other comment said, it's basically Libreoffice Calc, so try installing that on your laptop and see if you can get used to it.

My opinion: not as polished as Google Sheets, but good enough. However it's much better than the web version of excel.

Also, your experience will depend on the server your using to run it. Lots of people try to run Nextcloud on very weak hardware to save costs, and it does run well. But office in particular needs a bit more compute and memory to feel fast.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#88

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…

> high quality ones Denmark

That's fun to hear somebody say on the internet. The consensus amongst my peers here in Denmark seems to be that we also outsource most of our public software to Accenture, NetCompany, and KMD. Two of these are admittedly Danish consultancy companies, but they are private consultancies.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#89

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…

Whilst the UK has GDS most of our stuff is outsourced to consulting firms just like there, for example PA consulting and Accenture for home office stuff etc...

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#90

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…

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

why not both?
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