EU states looking for MS Teams/O365 alternatives
A group of agencies in Sweden have set up a project to find cloud providers who can provide an alternative to MS Teams/O365 following the Schrems2 decision [1]. Similar work is ongoing in other EU countries. Will more US software providers find partners in the EU to run cloud services in a way that doesn't involve risk of handing over customer data under FISA 702? There is definitely a huge need for compliant cloud solutions in the EU.
[1]: https://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.754943/swedish-gov-teams-alternative
85 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadI imagine it is a fruitless process in the short term
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).
So I'm saying it should be doable, theoretically. Starting from scratch might be an opportunity here, not an impediment.
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?...
Yes. You cited requirements that to be satisfied together require a huge effort. You want something that can "just work" and is also cross-platform, power user friendly (LaTeX), and should be snappy to be able to gain traction. Not to mention that you have to compete with the ecosystem lockin of Office-Teams-Onedrive-Sharepoint-Azure.
I frankly see no way a competitive alternative could appear without a billion dollar budget backing it.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
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).
The real-time collaboration is vastly overrated mostly, and thanks to Google's marketing. How many times have anyone had to do a real-time edit of document. How many times it was crucial for the process. And how is this better than git push/pulls?
Well, there are some 5% of all cases where real-time collaboration on a document is good to have, but 95% of all times is reasonably OK to share a screen and have few people stand right by the side of s.o. performing actions.
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.
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.
Not everyone desires to move to the US to get a Silicon Valley-level salary and sacrifice their Quality of Life for it.
Electricians in the US easily make over $70k early on, and over $100k with in a few years. And that isn't even the best paying trade job.
An experienced Programmer easily can get a job making 120k+, and that isn't even in the valley.
That being said, I wouldn't want to move here either. You get paid more, the homes are nicer and more private, and you fit a big SUV down any road. But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids. Along with that you have idiots that think trump was the second coming of jesus. And do nothing more than cry about thing that will only hurt them in the long run.
The median pay for electricians in the US is $56,900; the cutoff for the top 10% is under $100K [0], which is quite inconsistent with them “easily” making $70K early on and $100K within a few years.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/mobile/e...
Any Journeymen not taking home north of $65k should be looking for another job, as their employer is screwing them over. There simply isn't enough of them and employers will gladly pay for someone experienced to join their work force. Even with the recent massive pay increases it is hard to keep people from going somewhere else for even higher pay.
A website like that doesn't really keep up with what is really happening in a field like that. $100K/year working 50-60hours a week is not uncommon.
Which is a thoroughly unsustainable way of living. I like walking and biking, and I wouldn't want to sacrifice them and the practicality of having everything within a walking/biking/public transit distance for more house and yard maintenance.
> But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids.
And takes a mental toll having to worry about that kind of thing. I don't want to be afraid to go to the doctor.
Taking advantage of money is exactly what you want to do. Money will make you more money. So not having money working for you only works to keep you down. The more money you have working for you, the more it makes in a given part of time. Want to create generational wealth, you'll need to make as much $$ as you possibly can and teach your kids how to keep growing their chunk after you pass.
As someone that grew up in a lower middle class home where extra cash just didn't exist. My dedication in life is to make my children set in life. I was lucky enough to find a career path to allow for such entitlement. No it is not a sad life, its only sad if said money is purely for self indulgement.
No I wouldn't and there are dozens of (less comical) examples where I draw the line.
The actual Hospitals and Doctors in America have always been hands down better. Its only if you can afford it. Really any top tier Silicon Valley job is going to come with pretty good heath insurance. The Subpar Healthcare is more or less a poor person problem. Nothing like destroying net worth like having to go to the doctor with sub par insurance. Getting 3-6K+ in bills over a few nonsense visits.
Like I said before I wouldn't move to America either. But to think the EU isn't a$$ Backwards in many ways would be an understatement. I lived in the UK for 3 years, and like most of Europe school system is a hit or miss depending on location. Private Schooling is not uncommon in America for that reason.
This in part is why Americans in higher level careers (family's with income of 120K+) tend to retire with more money in their retirement accounts than their EU brothers. Nearly all my Fellow successful 30yo's had over 50K in their 401k when they turned 30. The ones that didn't are ones that will most likely always jump around to different entry level jobs.
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.
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.
[0] https://jitsi.org
[1] https://www.collaboraoffice.com
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.
I'm guessing you created an account on the default Matrix.org homeserver? While hardware requirements have been steadily dropping for months now, the default seems to attract more than enough people to negate these advances. So while Matrix.org accounts and rooms may feel slow, I hope you'll be willing to give it another shot some day in the future. To that end, I would highly recommend setting up your own server (as the French and German government agencies have done), or even hopping on mine (email is on my profile) if you just want to test it for a day or two.
As far as the cumbersome UI/UX - you got me. While some people like it, many people seem to disagree. Over time, the myriad of clients will presumably get better, and hopefully the people not currently enamored with the UX can find one they like :)
Regarding reliability, you may have to expand on that. I've been using my Matrix server (and Telegram / Whatsapp bridges) to chat for months now, and have had messages come through faster for me than others in the same group chat!
All that said, maybe you just had a bad experience. I'd never try and say you didn't, but hopefully there was another explanation than just "Matrix is still nowhere close to ready".
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-...
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.
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.
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.
Check out Multi-Account Containers if you're using Firefox. They solve this exact problem.
firefox -ProfileManager or firefox.exe -ProfileManager
All your problems solved, and even others you didn't expect you could ;)
I guess gmail/google calendar can play in this space, but are there any open source options?
[1] : https://www.linagora.com/en/
* 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.
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.
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...
[2]: https://basecamp.com/
https://www.infomaniak.com/en/kdrive/apps
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.
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.
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.
There is a reason why Azure and AWS based cloud systems are pretty much a standard. There isn't a solid alt.
O365 Exchange keep you free from worrying about keeping your server up to date. O365 Teams allows for not only communication but collaboration. Teams integrates with SharePoint allowing for project sites. O365 Sharepoint & Onedrive allow for extremely flexible data storage and data shares. With all the permission options you'd ever need. You can move your AD Login's user folder to use your personal Onedrive account, a highly effective tool.
There just isn't good options to replace O365. Google's GSuite is a crappy alt for Admins that couldn't figure out 365's complex admin consoles.
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.
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.
https://charmhub.io/nextcloud
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.
[1] https://www.zoho.com/
https://friendsky.cloud/
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.