[1]: https://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.754943/swedish-gov-teams-alternative
Web versions of software still sometimes feel like an attempt to sell a fraction of the feature set from 1995 in a laggy, less polished interface as an improvement.
That, and using an order of magnitude more hardware resources and leaking memory everywhere until your computer runs out of RAM. I have yet to find a browser which, with JavaScript enabled, will let me use it for more than a few hours without filling my RAM.
So I'm saying it should be doable, theoretically. Starting from scratch might be an opportunity here, not an impediment.
The problem is, our politicians are either bought-off, digitally incompetent or irrelevant (sorry, Die PARTEI and Pirates, you're good but you're too small).
its wishful thinking or marketing to imagine that LibreOffice is anywhere near this... or Google Docs.
For trivial documents - fine - any processor can do some work. For serious work - MS Office and most likely the desktop version of the app. And after all how did suddenly all desktop apps become obsolete? Well, they are not.
We need a set of stand-alone Office alternatives which are fully cross-platform (so, Electron), backwards compatible with Excel spreadsheets and also offering more advanced no-code functionality, and for the Word/PowerPoint equivalents something with the power of LaTeX but an easy to use WYSIWYG fall-back.
Is that really so much to ask?...
Which is one reason we don't need Microsoft's Office365 offer at all? I mean, especially in the case of big governments/orgs where they operate an entire fleet of machines, providing good desktop software would be a much better experience than crappy webapps.
Unless of course the goal is real-time collaboration, in which case that's an entirely different use-case and i have no idea how google/microsoft tools fare in this space (but Hedgedoc/Cryptpad are solid).
Still, as all -1 Earth goverments was doing nothing in last 40 years, it is now time to start ! Let it take 20 - 30 years - so what ?
Ok, -2 - China tried to create Windows clone from scratch and failed. Instead MS wrote them social-spying-for-credit system...
Why I say it's govs work and not some company or "startup" LOL ? Becouse of scope or more precise: users expectations.
In that last 40 years just Sun tried to do something sensible and we own them a lot.
So plan should be:
- build on package installable on premise
- many implementations - even few per nations - will not be a mistake. We have open formats in that century...
- client-server model, with server running on host or somewhere on LAN / VPN
- security included from day one, not "to be added later"
- drop http and browsers and rebuild this part, too much bullshit accumulated. After all it's just protocol stack. And we have 30 years long timeframe for it ! Browsers are too stagnated.
- do not include in planning stage peoples involved in "cookie consent" massacre... Looks like listening to American corporations ends like this. Tell them what to do and they will possibly do the best.
- assign funds NOW for next 50 years of incremental development
- make own CPUs, each nation / big company own. And build C compiler for that CPU. Make sure Linux or Minix work on it
Yes, somehow Americans are best with building many things but instantly as they got total control they mess it up. And then keep messing it more !
So let build things, make new good standards and then let Americans join ! :)
China created their own government Linux distribution. Every country should do exactly that.
They should adapt the sensible stuff, the innovation from China. Not the totalitarian crap like mass surveillance. But that is a feature set I expect to see in MS products in the future. This is an automatism for the company by now.
Most of these companies hire mediocre developers in small numbers because of budget constraints and then work on their product on borrowed time until the EU seed money runs out.
I can assure you some of the brightest people i know are paid a misery in your standards, first of which researchers working for public universities. Free software "consulting" companies like Collabora are also filled with brilliant people.
On the other hand, i don't think i know a single person that gets paid high salary (> 2000-3000€/mo) that does anything useful for society at large or has an interesting skillset. Those are usually managers or Chief Whatever Officers, and i believe the whole society would fare much better without them.
Trying to equate skill/usefulness with salary is a doomed enterprise. You'd be surprised with the knowledge and skills of some janitors cleaning your office, if you ever talk to them.
For 365 that's a lot harder, mostly because nobody has come close to what Outlook and Exchange can do in large orgs. Word, Excel, PP are somewhat replaceable and 80% of ppl in those orgs would probably be ok with the alternatives. It is the 20% that uses more niche features that may or may not work as expected in competing products.
* Mail (often with proprietary additions, also shared mailboxes)
* Calendar (appointments, mostly: plan with others’ free/busy times, invitations, invitation replies, integration with resource booking, …)
* Global Address Book
* Tasks (To-do list, can also be mailed)
I don’t know any non-proprietary solutions that integrate all this in a decently user-friendly way. Google certainly does, but then you might as well stay with Microsoft. It’s not just about the service capabilities either: The client (be it a web or a desktop application) has to be good as well.
Another great "feature" is that if you have accounts on two different organizations, it seems to be impossible to logon to the other account even after signing out from the first account, unless you use private mode on the browser.
I guess gmail/google calendar can play in this space, but are there any open source options?
A good example of it's use in EU is it's integration in online meeting platform for Latvian Parliament. It was quickly implemented once COVID-19 pandemic started. And Jitsi is a core part of it. https://www.saeima.lv/en/news/saeima-news/28986-the-latvian-...
I want it to succeed, but the base line should be being better than Teams in those points and I see it far from it.
And no, the average clerk can just a well use Word 95 and Libre Office is often just as feature rich as the MS alternative. The largest difference is Excel I believe. Well, then use Excel, but the rest isn't needed for anything.
They clearly are talking about Teams, Sharepoint, Onedrive, and Outlook.
O365 is by far the best option out there, especially compared to others in the same price range. Like Google's Gsuit which for the money is a second rate product. Only reason why GSuite is even used for many is ease of use. MS's 365 suite requires an experienced IT wizard to setup correctly. With about a dozen Admin consoles to shift through, especially with any Azure services used.
A real O365 alternative would be bad news for MS, and would require a massive amount of cash. It took over a decade to get 365 where it is now. This isn't something you can build overnight.
Domain controlling is perhaps something not easily replaced, but the rest is just fluff in my opinion. Teams might be the most useful app of all the bunch.
Seeing other cursors in a Word document was a fun at first, now it only induces endless rage and while neat, it certainly isn't a requirement.
From the little knowledge I have about this, it might not even be enough for MS to guarantee that the no data leaves EU borders but simply the fact that MS is a US company could be enough for US courts to force them to exfiltrate data. Not sure if this is correct or if they already have a company structure in place that would prevent this.
As much as I would like to see more competition thanks to this, I think at the end MS will figure it out and they will remain the dominant force.
The CLOUD Act of 2018 was written and passed with the purpose of forcing US companies to hand over data to the US government - regardless of where the data is stored.
The shortest answer is that Microsoft solved this problem by hiring lots of people and making it possible (Google, too, but that keeps you with the same compliance issue).
The first problem EU States need to solve is human resources. Then they will be able to discuss possible solutions.
Starting the discussion on how to replace Microsoft by looking for products is basically running into a 100% failure trajectory.
My 2 cents.
If the OnlyOffice developers made a giant leap to broaden their product they would likely attract a lot of customers in the EU right now.
I've also heard that Zoho has been having very good traction in Europe, especially among users looking to avoid the MS/Goog duopoly and stay on the right side of data sovereignty requirements.
But as they had many integration problems, they stopped offering this service in 2018[1] (German).
I think looking at GDPR and Schrems2 requirements, this would have been a viable model.
[1]: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Auslaufmodell-Micros...
[1]: https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/05/27/223...
It'll be quite fruitless in the short term, because already nobody really likes Office 365. Everyone just uses it for lack of better options.
But in the long term, governments announcing their intent to purchase should be quite the incentive for startups to replicate the core Office365 functionality. Of course, that's not going to be feature compete, but AFAIK most people only use a tiny subset of what Word / Excel can do.
I imagine it is a fruitless process in the short term
We want to be able to offer PRIVATE solution that will be able to deliver both secure and private cloud infrastructure at scale to organizations that can't affort placing their data in the hands of neither Donald Trump or Xi Jinping.
