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 politicians are well versed in.
This would a much better use for taxpayer money and valuable skill build-up of the nation's tech sector(that's severely lacking in Austria) if the government did its own IT development.
Plus, a lot more locals, especially with high moral values who care more about the state of their nation than just making a quick and easy buck, would find working for their government IT services more rewarding and giving a sense of ownership in their nations, versus working for those shady consultancies who are incentivized to milk the taxpayer dry and enrich the shareholders without caring about the quality of what they deliver because of their iron clad government contracts with little accountability which they got from buttering, wining and dining the right people in power, who then get hired as "consultants"(lobbyists) in those consultancies when their political careers are over to perpetuate this revolving door to the gravy train.
> 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 whatever they used Microsoft for, with NextCloud, the process which was executed by Atos.
That's how I understood it from the article at least. 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. So for a web article, it makes sense to highlight what people might understand and recognize.
> I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites
It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them.
The dependency is much weaker in this case. Finding somebody else to manage/host Nextcloud is easy while using MS Office without Microsoft is impossible.
True the UK has some decent government websites, but those were against a wider trend of huge government spending on all the well-known big tech firms.
That's fun to hear somebody say on the internet. The consensus amongst my peers here in Denmark seems to be that we also outsource most of our public software to Accenture, NetCompany, and KMD. Two of these are admittedly Danish consultancy companies, but they are private consultancies.
Why would you think the Austrian government is not doing its own IT development? There already is a company specifically for that: the Bundesrechenzentrum.
Whilst the UK has GDS most of our stuff is outsourced to consulting firms just like there, for example PA consulting and Accenture for home office stuff etc...
Coming after the Austrian military ditched MS Office (365, Copilot, whatever it's called now) for LibreOffice [0]. Similar stuff going on in Denmark and to some extent in Germany [1]. Way to go!
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.
Or just `sudo docker run --init --sig-proxy=false --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 80:80 --publish 8080:8080 --publish 8443:8443 --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/all-in-one:latest` if you follow these instructions: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one
If you want a full suite, the German government has been working on integrating and packaging a whole open source productivity stack: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
I think it depends on the feature set you're looking for. My nextcloud instance is basically online OpenOffice apparently. It doesn't match Google Docs in speed, responsiveness, UI or UX, and it costs me like $18/month to run, but it seems relatively light-weight. There's no idiotic gemini crap or a pop-up begging me to try it though, and all my data is my own. I'm not the Austrian government but that's the feature set I was looking for.
I just want a OK spreadsheet experience I can use from the web, and host myself in my home. How does whatever Nextcloud offer for spreadsheets compare to Google Sheets?
I mean, has Microsoft? Last two places I've worked at are in the Office ecosystem and it's incredibly bad. I need to reconcile documents all the time like it's 2005, sharing takes 15 clicks (which is why it's a massive pain to get Sharepoint AI ready, since everyone just shares with all rather than specifying with who to specifically).
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.
MS Office and other MS Products are unnecessary bloat of features and luxury that are dumped on customer only to keep the competition away. MS is YAGNI.
Part of a trend, but what made me an impression is that Atos helped in the transition. The old consulting companies would be more than happy to claw back some market share from the US cloud providers.
I hope that they stick with it, and that the trend continues. I think that it would benefit the EU, and its citizens, to break free from Big Tech in general, and replace their services with open source alternatives, keeping it up with local IT teams. I think this furthers sovereignty and is also a benefit for the public.
I get the appeal of moving away from Microsoft, but in my experience, Nextcloud is extremely bloated even for personal self-hosting. I wonder how well it will scale in a government setup.
I think it also depend if you only use it to sync and share files or if you want to use the included web apps.
But to be honest office 365 also struggle at times when using the web version of the office tools. Last week I had to do reporting on a small excel document with 4 sheets, the biggest one having less than 30 lines and 6 column and every time I had to insert a line it took 5 to 10 seconds for that line to appear and the whole excel web app was unresponsive until it appeared.
I think it's the other way around. I agree that NextCloud is overkill for personal use, but it does feature a ton of bell and whistles that become useful at larger scales.
Good, but this needs to happen on a much larger scale. These are "just" 1200 employees, but throughout Europe there are hundreds of millions of people working with Microsoft services and they all need to be torn out and replaced.
>As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR compliance and the upcoming NIS2 directive.
This also shows that they did it for the wrong reasons. It really doesn't matter if Microsofts services are GDPR compliant or not.
I don't mind the reason being "the right reason" or not, getting rid of Microsoft will be a net-positive regardless.
And it's a process that will take years, and be step-by-step, you can't just "torn out and replace everything" in one go, not to mention how bad of an idea that would be regardless.
I'm happy we continue to do this step by step, making sure it's working alright and is the right thing along the way.
All this money saved should be "unsaved" until a decent alternative is made. Everything that the government should spent here, should be invested into pan-european organization to develop a new office suite.
Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant. Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use.
Everyone I proposed this to tried it and said that its horrible and they don't want to use it. And I agree with them: because libre office is so sh*t, u use Google docs.
jack_tripper|4 months ago
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 politicians are well versed in.
This would a much better use for taxpayer money and valuable skill build-up of the nation's tech sector(that's severely lacking in Austria) if the government did its own IT development.
Plus, a lot more locals, especially with high moral values who care more about the state of their nation than just making a quick and easy buck, would find working for their government IT services more rewarding and giving a sense of ownership in their nations, versus working for those shady consultancies who are incentivized to milk the taxpayer dry and enrich the shareholders without caring about the quality of what they deliver because of their iron clad government contracts with little accountability which they got from buttering, wining and dining the right people in power, who then get hired as "consultants"(lobbyists) in those consultancies when their political careers are over to perpetuate this revolving door to the gravy train.
embedding-shape|4 months ago
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 whatever they used Microsoft for, with NextCloud, the process which was executed by Atos.
That's how I understood it from the article at least. 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. So for a web article, it makes sense to highlight what people might understand and recognize.
woodson|4 months ago
It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them.
hex-m|4 months ago
hshdhdhj4444|4 months ago
It would probably have been ATOS itself.
harvey9|4 months ago
delusional|4 months ago
That's fun to hear somebody say on the internet. The consensus amongst my peers here in Denmark seems to be that we also outsource most of our public software to Accenture, NetCompany, and KMD. Two of these are admittedly Danish consultancy companies, but they are private consultancies.
samus|4 months ago
zipy124|4 months ago
nasmorn|4 months ago
t_mann|4 months ago
[0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-off...
[1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source...
chris_wot|4 months ago
giancarlostoro|4 months ago
jeroenhd|4 months ago
Self hosting seems to consist of "set up nextcloud, set up collabora, click the integration button" https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-to-install-nextcloud-office/
Or just `sudo docker run --init --sig-proxy=false --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 80:80 --publish 8080:8080 --publish 8443:8443 --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/all-in-one:latest` if you follow these instructions: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one
weightedreply|4 months ago
https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/
odo1242|4 months ago
zenmac|4 months ago
CryptPad just seems more secure compare to Nextcloud.
saubeidl|4 months ago
If you want a full suite, the German government has been working on integrating and packaging a whole open source productivity stack: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
troyvit|4 months ago
embedding-shape|4 months ago
timeon|4 months ago
stronglikedan|4 months ago
harha|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
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infp_arborist|4 months ago
zkmon|4 months ago
gostsamo|4 months ago
munchlax|4 months ago
mentalgear|4 months ago
npteljes|4 months ago
0xbadcafebee|4 months ago
annoyingnoob|4 months ago
nis0s|4 months ago
kburman|4 months ago
prmoustache|4 months ago
But to be honest office 365 also struggle at times when using the web version of the office tools. Last week I had to do reporting on a small excel document with 4 sheets, the biggest one having less than 30 lines and 6 column and every time I had to insert a line it took 5 to 10 seconds for that line to appear and the whole excel web app was unresponsive until it appeared.
lou1306|4 months ago
constantcrying|4 months ago
>As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR compliance and the upcoming NIS2 directive.
This also shows that they did it for the wrong reasons. It really doesn't matter if Microsofts services are GDPR compliant or not.
embedding-shape|4 months ago
And it's a process that will take years, and be step-by-step, you can't just "torn out and replace everything" in one go, not to mention how bad of an idea that would be regardless.
I'm happy we continue to do this step by step, making sure it's working alright and is the right thing along the way.
criticalfault|4 months ago
Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant. Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use.
Everyone I proposed this to tried it and said that its horrible and they don't want to use it. And I agree with them: because libre office is so sh*t, u use Google docs.
rcbdev|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
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dukeofdoom|4 months ago