11 ms·
sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.
by daeros 3y ago
sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.
- Rinzler89 3y agoWhat's the alternative? Would they be able to do more without cloud office solutions? Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it. Would hosting an on-prem alternative yeld better cost and a higher uptime? I doubt it.
- Stranger43 3y agoThe drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled. It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head and we see actual blocks being mandated on high-security networks against US data harvesting companies(of which MS is but one).
- Rinzler89 3y agoAnd how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal. Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?
- fifteen1506 3y agoOf course. Same thing will all those environmental laws shenanigans. Companies are better off investing in short-term gains and leave the governments taking care of the environment and digital accountability of its citizens.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? I don't think they will stop, but they will become much more hesitant. Concerning your other points: it is of similar economic importance for the company to invest in precautions to prevent that you are taken hostage of, in this case by Microsoft. Thus such measures are actually often in the company's self-interest in opposite to fighting a virtual trade war for someone else.
- morsch 3y agoGovernments can take a longer and more strategic outlook than private enterprises. It's not even primarily about nationalistic trade wars: I want my tax euros to fund as little closed-source software as possible. It's crazy how much money even just our schools spend for software that can't be freely redistributed or modified. That said, I'm not holding my breath regarding the success of this most recent move.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coffeeling 3y agoI mean, even aside that? If you spend the money on European developers instead, that's jobs and tax dollars here.
- guappa 3y agoYou just do it like USA does: if you want to do business with the public sector, you must not rely on a foreign cloud.
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- rchaud 3y ago> Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it How long ago are we talking? I was sharing files with coworkers on a shared network drive 20 years ago. I could send files via IM as well back then.
- ctrw 3y agoListening to people talk about the 00s like we barely invented fire is something else. There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. The cloud is someone's mainframe and we moved away from those for the same reason why government wants to leave the cloud.
- rchaud 3y agoAgreed. A lot of "new tech" are just cloud versions of what used to be on-premise services.
- digging 3y ago> There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. Now there's a hot take! I suppose for this assertion to work, you'd have to consider Arpanet orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated an advancement than modern gaming, blockchain, VR, LLMs with fully integrated real-time image processing... all just minor increments?
- CRConrad 3y agoThere's been very little actually useful new in computing since the arpanet was invented. None of the shit you mentioned is a counterexample to that. HTH!
- prmoustache 3y agoWhen did people stop doing that? Last time I checked (which was our soc2 audit last year) most people didn't understand the sharing/collaborative features of sharepoint/office365 and were still doing it.
- shrubble 3y agoYou mean emailing .doc files around to co-workers, like what happened yesterday?
- panzi 3y agoNowadays they mail .docx around, haven't seen a .doc in a long time. I'm a software dev on Linux and haven't even LibreOffice installed. I tell the sender to please send it to me as .pdf. I write docs in markdown on GitHub (the company I work for uses GitHub, make of it what you will).
- quesera 3y agoPDF is easy to read. It's a ridiculous document format for the purpose of internal sharing and reading, but it still works well for that purpose. But PDF is not really optimized for editing or collaboration, and the tools available on Linux especially are limited.
- bee_rider 3y agoI like PDFs when I trust them, but I’m always a bit wary receiving them from random people. Don’t they support embedded scripting? I’d like a format that is like PDF, but markup only.
- panzi 3y agoWell, my viewer doesn't support embedded scripting. :D
- zo1 3y agoI live in a badly-maintained, "3rd world" country, and since we got office 365 maybe a half decade ago (probably more) it's been down once, for one afternoon. And that was due to what looks like an undersea cable sabotage. What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?
- dubcanada 3y agohttps://twitter.com/MSFT365Status https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status just scrolling through there is several outages, Teams, performance issues, etc. However it does tend to be only a specific area/country or a set of products rather then all of Office 365.
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoRecently we had a Teams outage at work that wasn't AWFULLY disruptive, but the only reason that is is that we don't depend on 365 cloud services to get anything done. We use Slack for chat features and more casual calling services (non-meeting) though of course Teams managed to be down on a meeting-heavy day, and we ended up organizing Slack huddles to get around it. The only real cloud service we use is OneDrive and the CEO is pushing us to get away from it because it has all kinds of strange problems with file permissions and we constantly have to call IT to unlock files.
- rawgabbit 3y agoWhat alternative tool does your CEO prefer?
- freetanga 3y agoEvery time my MS rep brings up O365 I correct him: “it’s Office 363. It does not work twice a year”
- markbranly 3y agoDoes he laugh it off or get offended? I find a good rep walks the line between customer advocate and company "man".
- freetanga 3y agoLaughs it off. Except the time I said that to his boss and the Western Europe MS Head Sales. That time he skirted it…
- wg0 3y agoStupid but genuine question because I never used it. How does Office 365 work? Like Office 2007 and such were all MFC/ATL code bases so calling GDI+ and all that. How does it work now? Canvas and Web assembly etc?
- freetanga 3y agoNo clue. But the most painful point is not so much loosing web-based apps (we still have local versions) but Teams, OneDrive and some management tools which are moot if services are down
- CRConrad 3y ago> How does Office 365 work? I think that depends on which part of "Office 365" you mean: The name itself is, as I understand it, a moniker for pretty much all Office products nowadays, both the "MS Office in the browser" and the "traditional MS Office applications". More of an all-encompassing marketing label than any specific product. So the free-standing MS Word / Excel / Outlook etc I use at work are "Office 365" just as the webpage equivalents I could use in stead (but don't, because they're still pretty massively inferior to the standalone apps). N.B: "As I understand it"; I could be wrong as Hell.
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- datenhorst 3y agoIs Office365 really down that often? I'm fortunate enough to not have to use it but I don't hear any complaints from my colleagues that do.
- boringg 3y agoThe fact that it would even go down and it requires online connection to vacuum up my data is such a bananas level oversight from MS. That company, man, that company.
- deaddodo 3y agoDoes it? I thought local installs still function offline for up to 48 hours, as long as you haven't passed the last synced expiry date? At least, that's how it used to function way back when I used it and had a not-always-online connection.
- evilduck 3y agoThey better never have Monday outages then.
- Spooky23 3y agoIt doesn’t. These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon. Microsoft is not my favorite company. But the only reason O365 has been down for days is when customer integrations (identity, security stuff, VPN rules, etc) break. That was even true in the early days before 365 branding. Source: I’ve been accountable for 250k+ user O365 environments as a customer director or VP for over a decade.
- boringg 3y agoReally? Or did that not make its way up the chain of command? None of your 250k+ accounts had issues because they didn't connect to the internet? What about license renewals - did anyone get shut out of their account immediately because they missed a license renewal date and happy to be off the internet?
- andsoitis 3y ago> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing. While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits). You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.
- daeros 3y agoGoogle's collaberative is probably miles ahead. it's been awhile, I've not used it since I was paying for Japanese lessons.
- rawgabbit 3y agoHmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre. Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing multiple copies of the same file on Teams which is another source of confusion.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoI don't know what you consider ideal conditions, but we do it all the time. It's pretty common for me to be reviewing a document and see the avatars of other people who are simultaneously reviewing and editing it. I've been doing this for years and have yet to have a problem. Sharing multiple copies of the "same" file is where the problems come in.
- rawgabbit 3y agoThere are multiple issues. [1] If you drag/drop or upload the file to Teams, it creates a copy and shares it via Teams SharePoint? [2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access". [3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are faced with two choices whose UX is confusing to say the least. One option is to "Copy Link" which has almost the same identical choices as "Share with Specific People". Note that "Share with Specific People" gives you options like "Anyone/doesn't require sign in" and the dialog has a button called "Copy Link". Huh? I thought I was sharing with specific people. I am still unsure who exactly can see the document. Or if the document was shared externally outside of my company. SHAREPOINT https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-files-or-folders-1fe37332-0f9a-4719-970e-d2578da4941c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-... ONEDRIVE https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-files-and-folders-9fcc2f7d-de0c-4cec-93b0-a82024800c07#ID0EDBJ=Share_with_specific_people https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-fi...
- cjk2 3y agoI use O365 all day across two orgs and have done for about 5 years. Never had a problem. Not once!