At a time of growing concern over the power of the world’s mighty tech companies, one German state is turning its back on US giant Microsoft.
In less than three months’ time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft’s ubiquitous programs at work.
Yes, but: this endeavour comes after/along with the development of a unified “open desk”, a replacement solution for the office and collaboration tools from microsoft etc, backed by the federal government. This ensures a base layer of interoperability between offices and makes training probably easier.
And if it sticks, good. But it still has the fundamental problem of needing to re-train all your existing employees AND train new staff who haven’t been brought up in that system.
Its on a completely different scale, but plenty of tech youtubers have done the “Let’s get rid of all the Adobe in my life”. Some succeed. Most tend to come down on some variation of “I can do about 99% of what I used to do in these two or three tools. And these ten things are actually genuinely easier and more performant. But we can’t take a month off making videos to get all of our editors up to speed. And this also removes our ability to contract out an edit to someone with the industry standard workflow”. And from my professional experience in different fields, that is true. Hiring someone and then spending a week or a month so they can use YOUR tools becomes a huge burden in not too long of a time.
I really hope Germany pulls it off this time and more governments follow. But I also remember all the other times I have read this story.
It’s quite easy to use. France is working together with them.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en
The Netherlands have joined last year.
Meanwhile Belgium has bought extra copilot licences and digs itself deeper into the M$ pit.
I wouldn’t count on the federation they’ve been doing nothing all these years. Schleswig-Holstein law has favoured FLOSS solutions since 2009 (“where technically possible and economical”), and bits and pieces were introduced as early as 2012. ZenDiS exists since 2022, opendesk is based on dPhoenixSuite, work done by Dataport precisely for Schleswig-Holstein, and they’re still doing most of the development work. More importantly though I’m not seeing any political commitment on the federal level, the Bundeswehr switching over because they care about stuff doesn’t mean that the, what, finance ministry cares. The BND probably also cares but tough luck getting them to confirm or deny anything.