If you want a full suite, the German government has been working on integrating and packaging a whole open source productivity stack: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
Their file storage solution is Nextcloud, chat is element, etc.
* My part of the world is not adjacent to Germany (where this paid offering is hosted)...so there is a little latency. But not nearly as bad as I expected.
* While file sharing and syncing and other basic stuff is included, the equivalent of online collabora (or whatever the online office suite is called) is not included and you would have to self host it...but hetzner state this in their relevant knowledge base webpages.
CryptPad just seems more secure compare to Nextcloud.
Self hosting seems to consist of "set up nextcloud, set up collabora, click the integration button" https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-to-install-nextcloud-office/
Or just `sudo docker run --init --sig-proxy=false --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 80:80 --publish 8080:8080 --publish 8443:8443 --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/all-in-one:latest` if you follow these instructions: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one
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.
From the article:
> The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements.
So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whatever they used Microsoft for, with NextCloud, the process which was executed by Atos.
That's how I understood it from the article at least. And I'm guessing more people are likely to have heard about NextCloud before while probably not heard about Atos before, unless you're Austrian. So for a web article, it makes sense to highlight what people might understand and recognize.
You don't need to be Austrian for that. Atos is a pretty infamous IT services provider that operates in all of Europe and has the same issues as all such service providers like Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro, IBM, NTT Data, etc, and so far I haven't see ONE SINGLE CASE where these clowns were involved in a government project and it didn't turn out to be an expensive, over-budget, delayed, shitshow leaving the taxpayers holding the bag.
Like for example Austria has a national highway company(ASFINAG) and national railway company(OEBB) where the government is majority shareholder and they work pretty damn good to serve the taxpayers and the users of those services whether they're Austrians or not.
So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites? It's 2025, when do we start treating IT infrastructure like road, rail, water, energy, healthcare etc already? How many decades more need to pass till the government realizes that the internet and associated services are also worthy of national importance and therefore ownership?
I'm not saying to nationalize the internet, on the contrary privatization and decentralization is better for consumers, but the digital interaction between taxpayer and government is something that should not be outsourced to the private sector, especially not to foreign publicly treaded companies like Atos, who have no skin in the local game and don't give a fuck if they leave an expensive mess behind as long as they can ride the gravy train while it lasts.
So excuse me if I have a high degree of skepticism when I hear about the involvement of the likes of Atos in taxpayer funded projects.
The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.
If you want to attract good talent, there are successful models out there now, but you have to start by paying them way more than the average government salary. But the contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try to stop them every step of the way.
So IT IS technically possible to gather the labor force to build the project in house, it just isn't much political motivation to do so when you have lobbyists swaying leaders in the other direction, and the investigative journalists and voters are too tech illiterate to understand this type of grift because when the government pays a billion Euros for a bridge or a tunnel and after 10 years the bridge or tunnel is not there, everyone notices and someone needs to go to jail or at least loose their job in politics for that obvious theft.
But if you spend a billion to consultancies on a government IT project, and it's an offshored clusterfuck that barely works and could have been done better by a local shop for 1/100 of the cost, then the journalists and taxpayers have no clue they've been robbed blind because nobody understands the nitty gritty and costs of SW development, and unlike bridges and tunnels, the public can't see the source code in the open as they walk to school to see that there's nothing there, which is why government IT projects has now become the best and easiest way to funnel taxpayer money into private pockets.
The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great outcome if greater awareness of this problem lead to more state resources being invested in open source alternatives to proprietary software.
If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of job.
corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery. for construction it's the exagerated foundation which they only actually deliver what's needed and pocket the difference. for software it is the hundreds of rewrites that may or may not have happened and are now in the past.
If there was a government IT office, it could build this in house, and after the initial investment in building the base infra, re-use it almost for free in every government agency in the same country. In the context of the EU, they could even make moves to share this code with other governments, passing on the savings there as well.
Opening up a whole department requires skills. If you don't have such skills, please hire the "parasite". I prefer that. At least they provide a service, overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in the business.
With all due respect, setting up a Nextcloud instance for a government entity is not really rocket science requiring a 150 IQ, Stanford grad, PhD, galaxy-brain labor force, but it's a skill that's easily abundant in Austrian and can be easily transferred to more of the tech labor pool to achieve the same results of what Atos did.
We're talking about a Nextcloud instance here, not building an entire hyperscaler from scratch, like AWS or Equinix, which is indeed a skill next to inexistent in most of Europe, which does indeed require contracting FAANG corps to build because we lack that capability in Europe.
I am talking about politicians that are supposed to create the conditions to set this up in a proper, honest and "good" way. As soon as this becomes a "department", nextcloud is not an option because it lacks xyz.
So let's reimplement it worse. All this to justify the need for having an IT department at all.
This is why sometimes I prefer that they just hire some company and that's it. One and done. (More or less).
Also, on a more disturbing note: how do you reduce the costs, when you have public employees....? You can't fire them, or it's nearly impossible to do so. Atos, on the other hand, you can switch.
An in-house development department on the other hand doesn't have to stick to the strictly disconnected way of tenders and the development team can actually work with the stakeholders to develop and evolve the spec throughout the project. They also don't need to guarantee future business for themselves through vendor lock-in or boost their corporate partners through technology choices.
This is an unprecedented case where a private company decided to go the open source route for a government project, usually it's only the in-house teams that pick open source.
Since only the government is doing these, there is no real gain from outsourcing - either way you pay the full costs (it need not be that way, but that is how it typically is). For IT lots of others also need that work and so you can share the overhead costs if you outsource.
That exists already (and has for a long while): the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them. The question is, why haven’t they been tasked with this migration?
I had never used Qualtrics, and I had to help the team figure out all kinds of basic things on how to actually configure Qualtrics. And they (on paper) were the experts supposedly. Even our common client was a bit amused about the whole thing.
It was my first experience seeing how these big firms operate. At the end of the day, some poor 28 year old at Atos (or probably outsourced to another country) who spent a few days getting some Nextcloud certification is probably doing a lot of the work, rather than thinking you're getting the best of the best who know this stuff inside out.
Let's see how it goes. At the end of the day, I (like most people) want more competition in this space. If more people use LibreOffice, hopefully that results in more investment in the product. So I hope for positive outcomes.
It would probably have been ATOS itself.
It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them.
As far as I'm concerned, all of these public sector ICT divisions are just a pile of contracts.
>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.
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.
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.
Microsoft Office was already dominant long before LibreOffice started. Hell, MSO was already dominant when StarOffice was renamed OpenOffice.org, long before LibreOffice was a thought in anyone's mind.
> Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use.
You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office. Ask anyone who's more well versed in Google Workspace and they'll tell you that MS is difficult to use.
Believe it or not, people like nice things. Microsoft Office looks nice. Libre office looks like a car accident. It's shallow, I know, but this is the response I get every time.
Everyone I know hates it. It is a small sample, true, but it says something. So I think, the fact Microsoft is so strong is to be blamed on the alternatives, or in this case only one alternative.
We need to look at this as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Turn it around. If it would be good, people would jump on it. Especially small companies.
Google workspace is a web app, no? So it being better than desktop is comparing different things. I use it and I like it, especially since I don't need advanced Features Microsoft offers
We have no good alternative. We have an alternative.
American company, no alternative at all.
Microsoft products are web apps as well.
You are kind of proving the point. You point to a Google product as a good alternative, not to the OSS product. I really want to like LibreOffice and it is a good product for what it is, but it is far from being a great product.
[0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-off...
[1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source...
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