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.
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 (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.
It would probably have been ATOS itself.
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.
[0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-off...
[1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source...
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
CryptPad just seems more secure compare to Nextcloud.
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 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.
I assure you that it is not. Every organization, public and private, beyond a certain size, has people whose entire day consists of collaboratively editing documents and spreadsheets. Responding to superiors who highlight a sentence and leave comments like "@Team can we tighten this up? Thx".
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.
>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.
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.
