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> Why do Microsoft products enjoy a monopoly on the server in these sectors when more secure (Linux-based) options are far cheaper and widely deployed already?

> Why do Microsoft products enjoy a monopoly on the server in these sectors when more secure (Linux-based) options are far cheaper and widely deployed already? Because there is no FOSS solution even coming close to the level of out-of-the-box integration of Office 365. Thunderbird has zero integration with LibreOffice, LibreOffice has zero integration with Owncloud (or whatever else one might use), neither has integration with a softphone software, much less a backend like Asterisk. And some software like Sharepoint or MS Access doesn't have anything on the FOSS side.

prmoustache 1y ago
OTOH that is a plus for security. When everything is interconnected/integrated, everything is usually pwned at the same time.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The problem is, decision-makers will not go for the "secure" way, they want a solution out of "one mold" - and so do users. It is a common complaint when trying to set up a FOSS solution, users complain that they have to learn and memorize different ways of doing the same thing across different application... and made worse by many FOSS projects not having UI/UX designers at all that care about consistency even in the scope of the application itself. And on top of that, many data exchange formats are not just "old", they're "fossil" and don't even come close to meeting the demands that people have come to expect.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    In the non FOSS world it still ends up the same. In every single company I have been working in the last 15 years, information was spread across so many different tools that integration was a moot point: Office365, Jira, Confluence, a separate ticketing tool, some mkdocs or single markdown files in repositories, spreadsheets, dedicated HR web portal, intranet, internal blog/comm/social media... Even within Office365 information is stored randomly as office files in sharepoint, teams channels, personnal onedrive, emails, copy/paste in teams, teams channel onedrive synched drivees, onenotes...[1] Also RBAC makes sure that whenever you came across one doc containing link to other stuff, you end up having no access to half of the links Bottom line the tightest integration doesn't reduce any friction because there is not a single toolsuite that fits every use case and people end up making a mess of everything. You never know where you can find the information and every single teams wiki ends up being a collection of links to a myriad of different places. Also half of the people still email people documents instead of the links because they don't understand anything else. [1] yes it is in the background the same product but people access them and more importantly know or search the information in totally different ways.
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
You are very close. But Office isn't the secret to Microsoft's unassailable dominance in enterprise. I could remove Office at work and we'd be okay. Active Directory is the key. A unified management of users, devices, groups, and policies that everything else is built on. Nothing outside of the Windows world even comes close. There's Linux tools to impersonate or talk to Active Directory, but no alternative to it. Group Policy lets me set up any number of tens of thousands of configuration changes and apply it easily to any group of users or computers with a few clicks, regardless of device manufacturer. Linux distributions aren't even consistent enough about which system tools are onboard, much less what policies can be configured on them. Web browsers all have Group Policy plugins, so everyone's web browser is configured by Active Directory too.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Linux is a hellhole, for Mac JAMF fills the gap pretty well. For Linux, I'd probably whip up Ansible these days if I were tasked with it, but getting it off the ground is ... nasty. Set it up as a systemd unit to run on boot, login and network-online.target, and that's it.

prmoustache 1y ago

OTOH that is a plus for security. When everything is interconnected/integrated, everything is usually pwned at the same time.

mschuster91 1y ago
The problem is, decision-makers will not go for the "secure" way, they want a solution out of "one mold" - and so do users. It is a common complaint when trying to set up a FOSS solution, users complain that they have to learn and memorize different ways of doing the same thing across different application... and made worse by many FOSS projects not having UI/UX designers at all that care about consistency even in the scope of the application itself. And on top of that, many data exchange formats are not just "old", they're "fossil" and don't even come close to meeting the demands that people have come to expect.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  In the non FOSS world it still ends up the same. In every single company I have been working in the last 15 years, information was spread across so many different tools that integration was a moot point: Office365, Jira, Confluence, a separate ticketing tool, some mkdocs or single markdown files in repositories, spreadsheets, dedicated HR web portal, intranet, internal blog/comm/social media... Even within Office365 information is stored randomly as office files in sharepoint, teams channels, personnal onedrive, emails, copy/paste in teams, teams channel onedrive synched drivees, onenotes...[1] Also RBAC makes sure that whenever you came across one doc containing link to other stuff, you end up having no access to half of the links Bottom line the tightest integration doesn't reduce any friction because there is not a single toolsuite that fits every use case and people end up making a mess of everything. You never know where you can find the information and every single teams wiki ends up being a collection of links to a myriad of different places. Also half of the people still email people documents instead of the links because they don't understand anything else. [1] yes it is in the background the same product but people access them and more importantly know or search the information in totally different ways.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago

You are very close. But Office isn't the secret to Microsoft's unassailable dominance in enterprise. I could remove Office at work and we'd be okay. Active Directory is the key. A unified management of users, devices, groups, and policies that everything else is built on. Nothing outside of the Windows world even comes close. There's Linux tools to impersonate or talk to Active Directory, but no alternative to it. Group Policy lets me set up any number of tens of thousands of configuration changes and apply it easily to any group of users or computers with a few clicks, regardless of device manufacturer. Linux distributions aren't even consistent enough about which system tools are onboard, much less what policies can be configured on them. Web browsers all have Group Policy plugins, so everyone's web browser is configured by Active Directory too.

mschuster91 1y ago
Linux is a hellhole, for Mac JAMF fills the gap pretty well. For Linux, I'd probably whip up Ansible these days if I were tasked with it, but getting it off the ground is ... nasty. Set it up as a systemd unit to run on boot, login and network-online.target, and that's it.