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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

#91

Post by protocolture »

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…

>So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites?

Not a comment on Atos directly, but I am betting that its an opex/capex thing.

Government departments see ongoing maintenance as internal, opex driven activity and right size their infrastructure teams to handle the ongoing workload.

Government departments see a large implementation project as an opportunity to save money through capex. Rather than increasing their resourcing internally to complete the project, they send it to tender. The tender document will require that the vendor hand over to their internal team for ongoing maintenance and support at the completion of the project. No ongoing impact to department opex budgets or headcounts.

Even if it blows out by like 50%, they probably still save money by not managing the labor costs internally. And they can force the vendor to take a hit on some overruns.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#92

Post by tacticus »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #24
tsimionescu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

> 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.

I mean sure if it wasn't for the fact that those bigger players are going to be looking at this as a way to print money.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#93

Post by estimator7292 »

infp_arborist wrote: post #62
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.

With AGI supposedly around the corner and (more realistically) current LLMs performing at least incrementally better -- why are we even thinking that Microsoft's or Google's solutions will provide enough value vs competitors in 3, 5 or 10 years? Cheaper or free alternatives might soon reach feature parity, and even previously complicated deployment is now aided by AI.

No one cares

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#94

Post by Brian_K_White »

jimjimjim wrote: post #90
Brian_K_White wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why not both?

Irrelevant to the point.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#95

Post by SchemaLoad »

infp_arborist wrote: post #62
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.

With AGI supposedly around the corner and (more realistically) current LLMs performing at least incrementally better -- why are we even thinking that Microsoft's or Google's solutions will provide enough value vs competitors in 3, 5 or 10 years? Cheaper or free alternatives might soon reach feature parity, and even previously complicated deployment is now aided by AI.

Multiple years of AGI around the corner and still no demonstrated improvement in submissions to FOSS projects. If anything it's slowed them down by wasting maintainer time reviewing slop.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#96

Post by marcosdumay »

g8oz wrote: post #82
stronglikedan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

As we digitize everything at work, people has done that less and less. That looks like an immediate collateral effect of paper or people that think like they are using paper.

There is still your random "let's make a list of X on the meeting", that would actually improve if you just had something that collects the items. But out of that, there has been a long time since I last saw people doing it.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#97

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

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.

You think governments should have a full integration team full time for potential software deployments of bought on the shelf solution?

That doesn’t make much sense. Governments don’t have that much software integration to do. Especially when you consider that these projects generally require specific knowledge of what’s integrated. What will these people do the rest of the time? Are you suggesting hiring specialists of every piece of software the government is likely to use full time?

I mean when faced with something you completely fail to understand there are two solutions: it’s all a scam or you are missing something fundamental. Here I think a lot of people are completely misunderstanding what integration is about.

Consider that these are not IT issues which push all these departments to ask for different feature sets and customisations leading to every integration being different and these are not problems programmers will solve.

Consider also what happens if projects fail. With an integrator, you sue them or breach with penalties and move on to a competitor. No harm, no foul. If it’s internal, you have a full on restructuration on your hand for something that is not even your core responsibility.

Anyway, I would like to see the face of some you when you learn that it’s highly likely that’s the people managing the integrators from the customer side were probably mostly consultants for a big consulting firm because that’s another thing government agencies don’t know how to do.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#98

Post by samus »

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…

Why would you think the Austrian government is not doing its own IT development? There already is a company specifically for that: the Bundesrechenzentrum.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#99

Post by samus »

criticalfault wrote: post #81
pessimizer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Both Linux and Android are OSS, though admittedly the latter is becoming quite more a walled garden as we speak.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#100

Post by taskforcegemini »

Jaxan wrote: post #53
dfedbeef wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has crypt in the name

CryptPad uses end-to-end encryption for all documents. It has a very different use case than other collaborative office suites. You can of course still use it as a replacement, but in my experience opening documents takes a bit of time.

have the russia-ties been debunked though?
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