9 ms·

Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

479 points by buyucu 11mo ago

nis0s 11mo ago
Countries serious about work they don’t want leaking should invest in homegrown talent, no one can be trusted.
npteljes 11mo ago
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.
gostsamo 11mo ago
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.
- munchlax 11mo ago
  Of course! Sell the disease and the cure.
  - gostsamo 11mo ago
    Actually, they lost a lot from the clouds providing managed services out of a box. Maybe they got some money from migrations, but this is not where the juice is.
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
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.
- odo1242 11mo ago
  You can run Libreoffice on Nextcloud with online editing, such that two people can open a file and edit it at the same time.
- weightedreply 11mo ago
  I host a small server for family and it seems to work well: https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/ https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/
  - ale42 11mo ago
    Is this light enough to run on a SBC (think of something with the power of a Raspberry Pi 3 or a bit more) with decent performance (for just 3-4 users)?
    - bobim 11mo ago
      I was running it on an Odroid N2 for 2-3 years, and upgraded to a RK3588 Orange Pi something a couple of years ago. It's not fast but it's useable. At one point I succeded in making the collaborative editing working, but it stopped after updates. Maybe it needs more love than what I'm able to spare, but the feeling after years is that you have to accept some level of unreliability.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  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?
  - esperent 11mo ago
    As the other comment said, it's basically Libreoffice Calc, so try installing that on your laptop and see if you can get used to it. My opinion: not as polished as Google Sheets, but good enough. However it's much better than the web version of excel. Also, your experience will depend on the server your using to run it. Lots of people try to run Nextcloud on very weak hardware to save costs, and it does run well. But office in particular needs a bit more compute and memory to feel fast.
jack_tripper 11mo ago
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.
- delusional 11mo ago
  > high quality ones Denmark 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.
- zipy124 11mo ago
  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...
- samus 11mo ago
  Why would you think the Austrian government is not doing its own IT development? There already is a company specifically for that: the Bundesrechenzentrum.
- 11mo ago
constantcrying 11mo ago
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.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  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.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- criticalfault 11mo ago
  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.
  - pessimizer 11mo ago
    Libreoffice is fine, better than we deserve. If they want it to be even better, maybe instead of throwing a few hundred million at MS, they could throw a few hundred million at Libreoffice. It's old as hell and kept up by charity. The idea that Libreoffice is so bad that giving up your freedom to Google or Microsoft is unavoidable just shows your actual level of objection to being slaves to US companies is close to zero. You'll only be pried away from your dependence on the latest popular versions of US products kicking, screaming, and complaining the entire time. You wouldn't be satisfied with anything but a clone, and you'd complain that the clone lacked the most obscure features of the real thing. And it's not just you, but a typical sort of aimless ridicule of FOSS product from people who feel guilty about not using them when their professed politics say they should. You'll talk a big game about independence, but your fictional pan-European office suite is far worse than Libreoffice, seeing as it doesn't exist. Couldn't be more feature-light.
mentalgear 11mo ago
Great to see how Open-source alternatives have matured enough that even governments are pushing to use them!
0xbadcafebee 11mo ago
Looks like training the users ahead of time led to a faster migration with fewer problems.
dukeofdoom 11mo ago
Mom hates teams, and wants skype back.
zkmon 11mo ago
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.
t_mann 11mo ago
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! [0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-office/ https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-off... [1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source-taking-denmark/ https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source...
- chris_wot 11mo ago
  I do wonder whether a lot of Europe is starting to decouple from U.S. tech.
  - monospaced 11mo ago
    Yes, there's a big push towards "Digital Sovereignty". The EU just now published a compact guideline for IT purchasing in regards to this: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/09579818-64a6-4dd5-9577-446ab6219113_en?filename=Cloud-Sovereignty-Framework.pdf https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/09579818-64a6...
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    It's slow going, but it's atleast going in that direction.
annoyingnoob 11mo ago
Nextcloud is great, easy self-hosting, lots of features.
kburman 11mo ago
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.
- prmoustache 11mo ago
  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.
- lou1306 11mo ago
  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.

479 points by buyucu 11mo ago

nis0s 11mo ago

Countries serious about work they don’t want leaking should invest in homegrown talent, no one can be trusted.

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.

gostsamo 11mo ago

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.

munchlax 11mo ago
Of course! Sell the disease and the cure.
- gostsamo 11mo ago
  Actually, they lost a lot from the clouds providing managed services out of a box. Maybe they got some money from migrations, but this is not where the juice is.

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

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.

odo1242 11mo ago
You can run Libreoffice on Nextcloud with online editing, such that two people can open a file and edit it at the same time.
weightedreply 11mo ago
I host a small server for family and it seems to work well: https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/ https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/
- ale42 11mo ago
  Is this light enough to run on a SBC (think of something with the power of a Raspberry Pi 3 or a bit more) with decent performance (for just 3-4 users)?
  - bobim 11mo ago
    I was running it on an Odroid N2 for 2-3 years, and upgraded to a RK3588 Orange Pi something a couple of years ago. It's not fast but it's useable. At one point I succeded in making the collaborative editing working, but it stopped after updates. Maybe it needs more love than what I'm able to spare, but the feeling after years is that you have to accept some level of unreliability.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
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?
- esperent 11mo ago
  As the other comment said, it's basically Libreoffice Calc, so try installing that on your laptop and see if you can get used to it. My opinion: not as polished as Google Sheets, but good enough. However it's much better than the web version of excel. Also, your experience will depend on the server your using to run it. Lots of people try to run Nextcloud on very weak hardware to save costs, and it does run well. But office in particular needs a bit more compute and memory to feel fast.

jack_tripper 11mo ago

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.

delusional 11mo ago
> high quality ones Denmark 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.
zipy124 11mo ago
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...
samus 11mo ago
Why would you think the Austrian government is not doing its own IT development? There already is a company specifically for that: the Bundesrechenzentrum.
11mo ago

constantcrying 11mo ago

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.

embedding-shape 11mo ago
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.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
criticalfault 11mo ago
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.
- pessimizer 11mo ago
  Libreoffice is fine, better than we deserve. If they want it to be even better, maybe instead of throwing a few hundred million at MS, they could throw a few hundred million at Libreoffice. It's old as hell and kept up by charity. The idea that Libreoffice is so bad that giving up your freedom to Google or Microsoft is unavoidable just shows your actual level of objection to being slaves to US companies is close to zero. You'll only be pried away from your dependence on the latest popular versions of US products kicking, screaming, and complaining the entire time. You wouldn't be satisfied with anything but a clone, and you'd complain that the clone lacked the most obscure features of the real thing. And it's not just you, but a typical sort of aimless ridicule of FOSS product from people who feel guilty about not using them when their professed politics say they should. You'll talk a big game about independence, but your fictional pan-European office suite is far worse than Libreoffice, seeing as it doesn't exist. Couldn't be more feature-light.

mentalgear 11mo ago

Great to see how Open-source alternatives have matured enough that even governments are pushing to use them!

0xbadcafebee 11mo ago

Looks like training the users ahead of time led to a faster migration with fewer problems.

dukeofdoom 11mo ago

Mom hates teams, and wants skype back.

zkmon 11mo ago

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.

t_mann 11mo ago

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! [0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-office/ https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-off... [1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source-taking-denmark/ https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source...

chris_wot 11mo ago
I do wonder whether a lot of Europe is starting to decouple from U.S. tech.
- monospaced 11mo ago
  Yes, there's a big push towards "Digital Sovereignty". The EU just now published a compact guideline for IT purchasing in regards to this: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/09579818-64a6-4dd5-9577-446ab6219113_en?filename=Cloud-Sovereignty-Framework.pdf https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/09579818-64a6...
- Telaneo 11mo ago
  It's slow going, but it's atleast going in that direction.

annoyingnoob 11mo ago

Nextcloud is great, easy self-hosting, lots of features.

kburman 11mo ago

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.

prmoustache 11mo ago
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.
lou1306 11mo ago
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.