'We're Done With Teams': German State Hits Uninstall on Microsoft (france24.com) 87
An anonymous reader shares a report: In less than three months' time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft's ubiquitous programs at work. Instead, the northern state will turn to open-source software to "take back control" over data storage and ensure "digital sovereignty," its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told AFP. "We're done with Teams!" he said, referring to Microsoft's messaging and collaboration tool and speaking on a video call -- via an open-source German program, of course.
The radical switch-over affects half of Schleswig-Holstein's 60,000 public servants, with 30,000 or so teachers due to follow suit in coming years. The state's shift towards open-source software began last year. The current first phase involves ending the use of Word and Excel software, which are being replaced by LibreOffice, while Open-Xchange is taking the place of Outlook for emails and calendars.
The radical switch-over affects half of Schleswig-Holstein's 60,000 public servants, with 30,000 or so teachers due to follow suit in coming years. The state's shift towards open-source software began last year. The current first phase involves ending the use of Word and Excel software, which are being replaced by LibreOffice, while Open-Xchange is taking the place of Outlook for emails and calendars.
UI design (Score:3)
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People want to run it the way they want to themselves.
And Microsoft probably heard this request as, "Mumble, mumble, cough, mumble, ..."
Viable alternatives and TCO (Score:2)
For organizations, the 10 year total cost of ownership is what is needed.
The second part is what is the smallest viable feature set the replacement needs to have.
The third part is, will the replacement product have a viable 10 year lifespan.
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If it's doing auto-transcription it's probably training an AI with your information, This could be a major security problem.
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If it's doing auto-transcription it's probably training an AI with your information, This could be a major security problem.
No this is configurable for the customer. Stop pretending enterprise users get treated the same way as the common idiot. Microsoft understands it's actual well paying customers have security concerns about what they say.
Re:zoom is worse (Score:5, Informative)
To be precise - it's the meeting host that can configure this. A general participant in the meeting cannot opt out if the host has enabled it.
We just had a small brouhaha on our uni's tech support email list about this.
Re: zoom is worse (Score:2)
Re:UI design (Score:5, Informative)
Element ( https://element.io/ [element.io] - a client based on the Matrix protocol) is really pretty cool for instant messages. It also features group calls and has a mobile app that is actually good. It is end-to-end encrypted and the management of the keys can be a challenge for non-tech users, but apart for that, it is really super cool.
If you want to go even fancier, you have WorkAdventure ( https://workadventu.re/ [workadventu.re] ). It allows you to build virtual offices in a 2D world. It comes with really easy to join video chats, and you can actually put screen-shares in "real" full-screen. It is also compatible with the Matrix protocol so you can send and receive messages from / to Element or any other Matrix client.
Anyway, in a true open-source fashion, you want to have a protocol that is independent from the app itself so that you can have many interoperable clients. The Matrix protocol is just this for instant messaging.
Disclaimer, I work at WorkAdventure :)
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Usability is completely no longer a concern to anyone. That's the issue. It must look "good" and by that I mean corporate modern.
The more options you only see when you mouse over, the better.
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I can get native Zoom apps on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS and Linux. It isn't perfect, and they've added a lot of cruft, but all in all, I've had less problems than I've had with Teams.
Re: UI design (Score:2)
The Linux app for Debian just fails silently for me.
Zoom is shit.
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Debian offers both things, but I am using nvidia so Wayland won't work even as well as it can work, which is not as well as X11.
I expect to get an error explaining something about why a program failed, even if it's not very informative. Any program which cannot manage that is crap, and I should not have to go out of my way to get some kind of error either.
I will just keep using zoom in the browser when I have to use it, which is thankfully infrequent.
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I liked Jitsi, other video conferencing programs exist too of course.
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I liked Jitsi, other video conferencing programs exist too of course.
Jisti was great until one day they just demanded login via facebook/google et al.
Overnight it went from "anyone with a browser can use it" to "everyone must be tied to facebook/google etc." There was supposed to be a way to self-host but this wasn't easy or well documented.
Jitsi claimed the change was because people were doing naughty things, but the change was so rapid and so hostile that it really seemed there must have been someone else pulling the strings. Did one of their competitors dislike the compe
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They probably vibe code their UX or something. It's not just bad UX, it's also buggy.
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Re: UI design (Score:2)
Re: UI design (Score:2)
Re: UI design (Score:2)
Re: UI design (Score:2)
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Microsoft? Usability? As long as there are massive numbers of Stockholm-Syndrome sufferers that keep claiming MS crap is good, MS has zero incentives to make actually good products. Not that they have the capabilities either.
Denmark now Germany (Score:1)
Denmark now Germany
https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
Re:Denmark now Germany (Score:4, Insightful)
It's almost like there's a tech giant backlash in the EU. I wonder what triggered that recently... https://www.computerweekly.com... [computerweekly.com]
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Yep. What could it be? And it cannot be undone anymore, this is stategic now. Obviously, it will take a decade or more to make it complete, but as soon as there is enough momentum, it cannot be stopped anymore. And there may even be legal requirements incomming.
How do people get stuck with Teams? (Score:1)
I can understand why a bunch of people have to reluctantly use Excel or Outlook: network effects and proprietary formats make it a requirement. If some slobbering, retarded fuckwit decided to switch to Microsoft Word 35 years ago, it makes sense that their org still has to use MS Word now: they have documents they need to load. (Although haven't these formats been pretty well reverse-engineered by now? LibreOffice seems to be able to open most stuff these days.)
But Teams? You can drop that in instant. Unlik
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If you are using teams as a video meeting service only yes it is easy to leave. If you are using it as a slack replacement then many conversations and workflows and sharing of files etc. can become very difficult to replace. It isn't as easy as migrating a standard mailbox from outlook to another email solution.
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Re: How do people get stuck with Teams? (Score:2)
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The problem is that I need to stream lecures to students. While teams is pretty crappy, there seem to be no options that are really any better. If you have a suggestion, I am all ears.
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I've had rendering nightmares in Word, including docx files. There are most certainly version and rendering issues in Word just like any other word processor. It gets really horrendous with tables and frames, particularly when they are used as some sort of typesetting system, at which point try to open up on a different version of Word than the documented was created on, and it can turn into a mess.
Re: How do people get stuck with Teams? (Score:2)
Wordperfect was fine, and I mean the GUI version. It still lived on for a long time (and may be in use still) because it was FAR better for forms and formatting.
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WordPerfect 'GUI Edition'? HERETIC! You can pry my command line out of my cold, dead fingers!
PS I haven't used WordPerfect this century...
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I never used the original Wordperfect, I was only near people who were using it, but by the time I wanted to do any word processing at all I had an Amiga. And while I still had it, Workbench 2 came out, and brought scalable fonts along with it.
Of all the DTP software of any description, I align myself with PageMaker -> InDesign. I have used a number of packages and still go back to Adobe when I want to do some layout and typesetting. I go back to before they required a sub, though. My experience with it
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Back in that era Word Perfect was much better than Office.
Re:How do people get stuck with Teams? (Score:5, Informative)
35 years ago there was no serious competition for Microsoft Office. It was objectively better than the available alternatives, assuming you judged based on functionality and not cost (or ideology).
35 years ago, MS Office did not exist. WordPerfect and Lotus still reigned. MS Office was released in October 1990, it took until 1995 before it got any traction.
Microsoft Office can open 100% of stuff.
Nope: LibreOffice can open Word95 files which more recent versions of Word cannot open.
Re: How do people get stuck with Teams? (Score:2)
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If some slobbering, retarded fuckwit decided to switch to Microsoft Word 35 years ago
35 years ago there was no serious competition for Microsoft Office. It was objectively better than the available alternatives, assuming you judged based on functionality and not cost (or ideology).
No, Word wasn't better, WordStar and WordPerfect were both massively superior to the nascent "Word" but MS sold it at a loss ($30 or something) which wiped out the companies who were making a living selling word processing software. Of course, as soon as the competition was destroyed, the price went up to about the price-point that WordStar and WordPerfect had been selling at.
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> 35 years ago there was no serious competition for Microsoft Office
35 years ago was 1990. Microsoft Office had existed for barely months having been released at around the same time as Windows 3.0 and only ran on what was considered a clumsy, difficult to use, memory hog called Microsoft Windows 3.0 which unlike the next point release never took hold. While Word for DOS existed, it wasn't part of "Office" and it had stiff competition.
For the next five years Word for Windows faced stiff competition from
Re: How do people get stuck with Teams? (Score:2)
In most companies, Microsoft products is all the IT team know.
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In most companies, Microsoft products is all the IT team know.
To be fair, the IT team is hired based on what the company currently uses (and that is often Microsoft products), and then any additional training will be on those products. It is a self fulfilling prophecy that the team mostly only knows what the company uses (many people in corporate IT are no longer especially curious about alternatives unless they want to get a job at that cool new company down the street that uses LibreOffice).
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You get stuck with Teams when the company or agency you work for decides to go all in on Microsoft, and when all the companies and agencies you collaborate with also go all in on Microsoft.
You can't possibly be so obtuse that you don't know most corporate or government peons have no say over what office suite software they use, let alone even admin rights to the computer they use.
Enterprise purchasing agreements (Score:2)
There are lots of different plays, but the most obvious version is, Microsoft salesdroid will ask if you're using Slack and come back with, "tell you what, Teams will cost you nothing, we'll zero that." Now $manager can either pay for Slack too, or replace it for "zero cost".
That discount probably goes away next sales cycle, but in a 20k person company, saving that $5/head/month (or whatever it
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Because it's bundled with MS's Big Beautiful Bundle. Clueless managers only look at the superficial cost savings and don't factor in the wasted labor from dealing with bad bundled products compared to a real application from a more competent different vendor.
Penny Wise Pound Foolish.
Re: How do people get stuck with Teams? (Score:2)
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Included as "sweetener" to their rather expensive 365 offerings?
Because that is what the financial department sees, a "free"-ish communication platform with the software they need to license from Microsoft anyway. People in those departments are under the impression that their word are much more valuable/important than they are...to the rest of the company, who now needs to work Teams into their general 'workflow'.
Never had a big problem with Skype, even after Microsoft bought it. Teams however, that is a p
is this new? (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel like I have been reading the same article about German Government offices leaving Microsoft software since about 2003 if not the early 90s. Did they leave and come back and break up again or is this a 20 year move? I do see articles from 92 stating Germany was going to leave Microsoft applications. This is likely a renegotiation tactic.
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What has changed now is that your buffoon in chief decided to sanction quite a visible public prosecutor, who now almost can't do his job anymore. The ICC prosecutor was dependent on Microsoft products.
Well, now the US has proven that it can pull the plug from anyone using US products. Germany and Denmark took note and they're dumping Microsoft as fast as they can. The US simply isn't a reliable partner anymore.
So, this probably isn't a negotiation trick. Welcome to a world where US power over the EU is wan
Re:is this new? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's almost like elections have consequences, and America has elected that it and its businesses are going to be treated like the plague. Well, even more than that, even visiting the US is dropping, and now with US Marines on city streets in a major US city, well, fuck that banana republic. I will never enter the US again.
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From a current 3rd-worlder to a future one, welcome to the club! Our generalissimos also love their birthday military parades, as do yours! 3
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I was wondering the same thing. For as long as I've been on Slashdot, at least, I've read sporadic stories about one large chunk of Germany or another leaving Microsoft and adopting an open-source alternative. At this point I wouldn't have thought there was a German worker using a Microsoft product... but apparently there's still at least one group over there beholden to Redmond.
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They don't all move as one singular unit.
They do when Microsoft speaks:
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer
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Germany is much like the USA, a federation of independent states to some degree. This story is about Schleswig-Holstein. Previous stories have been about other states as well as federal departments, dating all the way back to the early 2000s.
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There was this highly visible project of the Bavarian capital Munich that moved and moved back after MS moved their headquarters there and because the way they tackled the project.
I live in the state that's affected and think it's about time we take things into our own hands, even if it means a lot of extra work and extra costs.
I met the state government people responsible multiple time (because they have been consistently showing up at IT related meetup events - even the head of state attended a few years
Eff Teams: go back to smoke signals and drumming (Score:2)
MBA Management is just lazy thinking. No Strategy and follow the leader is how you get to a monoculture of dependency.
Glad to see someone, somewhere, somehow trying to grab the steering wheel.
Prost!
They all suck at some important things (Score:5, Insightful)
My wife is a sign language interpreter, and does a lot of remote work, especially since covid.
To handle a meeting on Teams, sign language interpreters need to pin two video streams - the current speaker, and the deaf client(s).
It is essentially impossible to do this in Teams - they routinely open up a separate Zoom session for interpretation.
You'd think the inability to do this would be an ADA violation...
Video? (Score:1)
Haven't they tried this already? (Score:4, Informative)
A few years ago? Then they went back to Microsoft?
Re:Haven't they tried this already? (Score:5, Informative)
I did a little digging to help my memory. Munich had done this in 2004 and then returned to MS in 2017. This is in Schleswig-Holstein.
Re:Haven't they tried this already? (Score:4, Funny)
So... does that mean there's an egg on top of Schleswig?
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Re: Haven't they tried this already? (Score:2)
Someone should get those two jurisdictions in touch. Make them share lessons learnt.
They are just south of Denmark ... (Score:2)
... which just ditched MS for software in public service. The northerns are the most reasonable when it comes to public service IT. (For context: I live in Germany and they're both to the north :-) )
Please, please, what's the Open Source alternative (Score:2)
Re: Please, please, what's the Open Source alterna (Score:2)
Company IRC server? (jk, but only mostly)
Isn't this the second time? (Score:2)
Monopoly Spell (Score:3)
I wanted to murder Teams hundreds of times over the past few years. It's slowly getting better, going from F-minus to D-minus, but it still sucks the big one to Hell and back. Employees just eventually get used to its many oddities and flaws and learn to work around them.
The only reason so many shops use this P.O.S. is that MS bundles it with all the other MSware, making it a "really terrific deal". It couldn't survive in the market as a single product, even if open-sourced.
But the bundle "deal" is penny-wise-pound-foolish, because the total labor wasted dealing with its f$ckage is much more than the bundle savings. PHB's don't weight the labor waste into the judgement because it's not taken directly out of their own budget.
SharePoint is in a similar boat.
BigBlueButton anyone ? (Score:2)