Following the example of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice, the Danish Ministry of Digitalisation is doing the same. Caroline Stage Olsen, the country’s Digitalisation Minister, plans to move half of the employees to LibreOffice over the summer, and if all goes as expected, the entire […]
It seems like they are doing this to push back on mono-culture. Probably just to save money really. Using 365 saved our small office a lot of time, but it is pretty expensive since it is a constant subscription. I already switched away from Adobe at to Wondershare for PDF editing since we can get a single purchase from Wondershare and have to pay a subscription to Adobe. I would be tempted to do the same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling and the integrated sharepoint files is pretty useful.
That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that’s outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis…
same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling
Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.
Nextcloud has a similar file storage like SharePoint/OneDrive minus the content types and taxonomy trees, but I doubt you need those. If you use Only Office as online Office App in Nextcloud, you have a comparable UI to Microsoft and it uses Office Open XML (docx, pptx, xlsx) as standard file system.
I don’t know what a paid hosting for your team would cost, but it could be worth it.
Unfortunately change is difficult. If it was just me and my controls team we would probably do something like that, but my boss is a little older and I had hard enough time getting him to work on the cloud as it is, and he works in 2 cities, so he isn’t always in reach to help him. If it doesn’t behave exactly like windows folders, it might be a lost case.
The other people in the office I could train easier. It’s a small office with less than a dozen people on the system at any one time. I am “head of IT” but that isn’t my main job. Having something that installs and sets up quickly is a boon. Not that the sharepoint folders update all that quickly, it takes almost a full day for all the files to show up properly, especially if it is a new user. And if onedrive chokes on any one file it completely stops updating file changes until you fix that. Not a problem for anybody with some savvy, but half the people don’t even notice until their files have diverged and somebody calls them and asks why they don’t see some change or another.
All that being said, if I can save a few hundred dollars a month I could probably eventually talk them into moving over to something cheaper like I did with the Wondershare PDF editor. That was an easy move because it works exactly like Adobe but doesn’t crash on large files nearly as often. It is sort of a shame that Adobe is worse at handling their own file format than nearly any other PDF editor.
I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.
Push back against what? All of these countries’ governments moving away from MS are doing it for digital sovereignty, nothing else. They want to be in control of their data.
The dream here, in FOSS terms, is that governments see the massive potential value in using FOSS, and start actively contributing to it.
Imagine if the German or Danish government puts the people on their IT payroll (who are now maintaining Microsoft systems) to maintain FOSS systems. This would be a huge benefit for everyone, if enough big actors do it, it may be what pushes stuff like Microsoft into being a niche service.
This is what is needed to push back on Microsoft.
It seems like they are doing this to push back on mono-culture. Probably just to save money really. Using 365 saved our small office a lot of time, but it is pretty expensive since it is a constant subscription. I already switched away from Adobe at to Wondershare for PDF editing since we can get a single purchase from Wondershare and have to pay a subscription to Adobe. I would be tempted to do the same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling and the integrated sharepoint files is pretty useful.
That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that’s outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis…
Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.
Nextcloud has a similar file storage like SharePoint/OneDrive minus the content types and taxonomy trees, but I doubt you need those. If you use Only Office as online Office App in Nextcloud, you have a comparable UI to Microsoft and it uses Office Open XML (docx, pptx, xlsx) as standard file system.
I don’t know what a paid hosting for your team would cost, but it could be worth it.
Thank you, I’ll give it a look.
Unfortunately change is difficult. If it was just me and my controls team we would probably do something like that, but my boss is a little older and I had hard enough time getting him to work on the cloud as it is, and he works in 2 cities, so he isn’t always in reach to help him. If it doesn’t behave exactly like windows folders, it might be a lost case.
The other people in the office I could train easier. It’s a small office with less than a dozen people on the system at any one time. I am “head of IT” but that isn’t my main job. Having something that installs and sets up quickly is a boon. Not that the sharepoint folders update all that quickly, it takes almost a full day for all the files to show up properly, especially if it is a new user. And if onedrive chokes on any one file it completely stops updating file changes until you fix that. Not a problem for anybody with some savvy, but half the people don’t even notice until their files have diverged and somebody calls them and asks why they don’t see some change or another.
All that being said, if I can save a few hundred dollars a month I could probably eventually talk them into moving over to something cheaper like I did with the Wondershare PDF editor. That was an easy move because it works exactly like Adobe but doesn’t crash on large files nearly as often. It is sort of a shame that Adobe is worse at handling their own file format than nearly any other PDF editor.
It probably won’t save money in the first year. The transition will likely offset any gains.
It likely will save money every year after that. For everyone. More users means more interest means a smoother experience for everyone, generally.
I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.
Push back against what? All of these countries’ governments moving away from MS are doing it for digital sovereignty, nothing else. They want to be in control of their data.
The dream here, in FOSS terms, is that governments see the massive potential value in using FOSS, and start actively contributing to it.
Imagine if the German or Danish government puts the people on their IT payroll (who are now maintaining Microsoft systems) to maintain FOSS systems. This would be a huge benefit for everyone, if enough big actors do it, it may be what pushes stuff like Microsoft into being a niche service.
People in government IT jobs who maintain Microsoft systems aren’t going to be contributing to FOSS codebases. They’re not developers.
They can report unusual bugs though and SHOULD be competent enough to write good bug reports
I don’t know how many government workers you’ve met, but I wouldn’t have much hope of that haha
Of course, but it sets an example, proves to people that Linux can be mainstream and usable well beyond the corners where that mindset already exists.
It’s excellent advertising and promotion.