'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft
'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft
As a leading global news agency, AFP offers quality multimedia content in video, text, photo and graphics in six languages and now reaches North American audiences
At a time of growing concern over the power of the world's mighty tech companies, one German state is turning its back on US giant Microsoft.
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.
The whole article is a good read but this is the important bit:
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.
They also blame Trump which is pretty hilarious but probably not terribly relevant to the community.
Trump's executive order forced Microsoft to disable access for ICC's Chief Prosecutor. So, in a sense, Trump is indeed a threat to digital sovereignty.
Oh, he is a threat to all types of sovereignty, in every sense.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email, and his bank accounts have been frozen.
That includes Windows, right?
…
Right?
…
It says they will be replaced soon, so im assuming it's phase 2.
I get it! It’s a fucking terrible program. At the moment I’ve got two instances of it running, one old and one new. Why the fuck? Why doesn’t all the old things transfer to the new one?
It’s also a joke to maneuver. The different subjects have “hidden” subcategories that aren’t supposed to be hidden but are! So you have two extra clicks to find the folder.. it’s a giant fucking joke that a company the size of MS can’t make this tolerable.
Working with information today could be hundreds of times better if there were serious open standards. Switching away from outdated proprietary junk, to an open source version of that junk is great, but late. And, let's hope, its the start of real change. To catch up to where we should have been decades ago if we hadn't been held back by lazy MS et al. Digital information should zip between people and have real meaning. Not have to go through a thick layer of IT, and files and formats, and redundant copies, and silos and having to know tech to get things done. Peoples expectations are so low, they are satisfied with the crap we have today.
hadn’t been held back by lazy MS et al.
MS is not lazy but working hard to maintain their lead.
edit: Just noticed that my phrasing is bad and could be seen as praise. OP is right, MS is holding everybody back.
I meant to say that they abuse their market domination to maintain their lead.
Look at MS Teams. It was free until Slack was done as a competitor.
MS did things but that's inevitable. The crucial part are the things that they prevented.
It's increadible that OP is even downvoted.
I'm definitely in the minority, but i really never had or have any issues with Windows or Teams like everyone seems to complain so much about. With that said, I absolutely love that they are making this move. As someone who works in the area and sees the pricing and how much our company spends on Microsoft I find it appalling and absurd that anyone is willing to spend that much on licensing... I wish I could work on a project like this just to see what the savings could be overall.
The worst part for teams is if you do contract work and need to be a part of multiple teams instances... It's a MASSIVE fucking pain. Microsoft's login processes are absolute infuriating and even more so if you have to log in to multiple different accounts that all somehow have the same email address but different tenants without letting you know which account version is for which tenant.
We had to use slack for our internal stuff so we could always be in contact with each other because you could only be signed into one teams instance at a time without jumping through crazy hoops.
I initially wanted us to move to teams but that hurdle stopped us. I'm kinda glad in hindsight.
Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn't use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.
I'm stuck with Teams in my job.
I fucking hate it.
It crashes, it loses things, it has a lousy search function, to automate messaging you need to learn one of the arcane and convoluted MS services because they deprecated the much easier webhooks...
When something fails (and it always does) we just say "Well... it's Teams", and that sums it up.
do France next
Why would we uninstall France?
Why would we uninstall France?
🤔
German state hits uninstall on France
😅
Aren't French authorities quite ahed on FOSS adoption in their platform? I.e. https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en
even the most sensitive information are collected through Microsoft and government sites use adobe too 🤷 Windows is the OS in almost all government computers.
not to forget all the WhatsApp use for official communication
facebook and xitter accounts of most government offices are still active
It's a cooperation between France, Germany, and more recently The Netherlands.
Teams is just an incomprehensible version of Discord. What's the open source version of that? Matrix?
Can anything be more incomprehensible that Discord?
You love to see it.
Nice
I didn't see what exactly they're using for a Teams replacement?
Open desk, is the office suite they use, I suppose. Matrix chat, perhaps?
It has an inbuilt messenger based on element, apparently.
Many are switching to Nextcloud Talk.
At my work all but me love microsoft. But ..... They started to complain about teams too. I only use the chat because it's impossible to avoid.
Literally no one I work with likes Teams but we keep using it because that's just what we do. Other options basically don't exist simply by virtue of being either not Microsoft or not overwhelmingly the market leader.
My work hate Microsoft but don't see a viable alternative. Microsoft is safer because of their stranglehold.
It was barely tolerable, then they gated proper noise cancellation behind some AI privacy destroying BS. Excellent choice, fu Microsoft
I want to say various cities/regions in Germany make statements like this every few years? And they usually end up rolling back when it becomes clear the cost to retrain both existing staff and new staff isn't worth it.
That said: This gets the national security bump so maybe it will stick. Also nobody on the planet likes to use Teams.
Yes, but: this endeavour comes after/along with the development of a unified "open desk", a replacement solution for the office and collaboration tools from microsoft etc, backed by the federal government. This ensures a base layer of interoperability between offices and makes training probably easier.
And if it sticks, good. But it still has the fundamental problem of needing to re-train all your existing employees AND train new staff who haven't been brought up in that system.
Its on a completely different scale, but plenty of tech youtubers have done the "Let's get rid of all the Adobe in my life". Some succeed. Most tend to come down on some variation of "I can do about 99% of what I used to do in these two or three tools. And these ten things are actually genuinely easier and more performant. But we can't take a month off making videos to get all of our editors up to speed. And this also removes our ability to contract out an edit to someone with the industry standard workflow". And from my professional experience in different fields, that is true. Hiring someone and then spending a week or a month so they can use YOUR tools becomes a huge burden in not too long of a time.
I really hope Germany pulls it off this time and more governments follow. But I also remember all the other times I have read this story.
I wouldn't count on the federation they've been doing nothing all these years. Schleswig-Holstein law has favoured FLOSS solutions since 2009 ("where technically possible and economical"), and bits and pieces were introduced as early as 2012. ZenDiS exists since 2022, opendesk is based on dPhoenixSuite, work done by Dataport precisely for Schleswig-Holstein, and they're still doing most of the development work. More importantly though I'm not seeing any political commitment on the federal level, the Bundeswehr switching over because they care about stuff doesn't mean that the, what, finance ministry cares. The BND probably also cares but tough luck getting them to confirm or deny anything.
This seems to be the same article, but uses a URL that doesn't lead to a page that is essentially blank for me: https://us.afpnews.com/article/?were-done-with-teams-german-state-hits-uninstall-on-microsoft,49PM3G2
Is that not literally the same link as the OP?
EDIT: Ah, the OP's edit from 30 minutes before your comment has not federated out to your instance yet.
I currently see this URL provided by https://thebrainbin.org/u/@Pro@programming.dev and it is not identical: https://us.afpnews.com/article/?were-done-with-teams-german-state-hits-uninstall-on-microsoft,49PM3G2
I took a look and its quite complicated to install requiring a very complex kubernates clustwr. Unclear why it is so disparate when something like nextcloud can be single containerised. I feel like this could be simplified for deployment.
I've used them all pretty much and it's a really shitty product
