this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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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.

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[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 day ago (4 children)
[–] Bjonay@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Aren't French authorities quite ahed on FOSS adoption in their platform? I.e. https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en

[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago

even the most sensitive information are collected through Microsoft and government sites use adobe too 🤷 Windows is the OS in almost all government computers.

not to forget all the WhatsApp use for official communication

facebook and xitter accounts of most government offices are still active

[–] Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

It's a cooperation between France, Germany, and more recently The Netherlands.

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[–] Anon518@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I didn't see what exactly they're using for a Teams replacement?

[–] Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Open desk, is the office suite they use, I suppose. Matrix chat, perhaps?

[–] Deckname@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It has an inbuilt messenger based on element, apparently.

https://www.opendesk.eu/de/produkt#chat

[–] Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

Jup, Matrix indeed. Thx

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It was barely tolerable, then they gated proper noise cancellation behind some AI privacy destroying BS. Excellent choice, fu Microsoft

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

I've used them all pretty much and it's a really shitty product

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I want to say various cities/regions in Germany make statements like this every few years? And they usually end up rolling back when it becomes clear the cost to retrain both existing staff and new staff isn't worth it.

That said: This gets the national security bump so maybe it will stick. Also nobody on the planet likes to use Teams.

[–] PatrickYaa@feddit.org 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] thirtyfold8625@thebrainbin.org 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This seems to be the same article, but uses a URL that doesn't lead to a page that is essentially blank for me: https://us.afpnews.com/article/?were-done-with-teams-german-state-hits-uninstall-on-microsoft,49PM3G2

[–] SatyrSack@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Is that not literally the same link as the OP?

EDIT: Ah, the OP's edit from 30 minutes before your comment has not federated out to your instance yet.

[–] thirtyfold8625@thebrainbin.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] SatyrSack@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hmm, I think this is an Mbin vs Lemmy issue. There are two differences in the URL:

  1. The broken URL has %2C instead of ,. This part does not make a difference, because that resolves to a comma anyway
  2. The broken URL has = at the very end for some reason. This is what breaks it. Remove that character, and the URL works fine

The weird thing here is that the broken URL only ever shows up on Mbin. Below are a few different links to the comment in which you shared the broken URL. If you view the comment on your Mbin instance, it is indeed broken. But if you view it on this community's Lemmy instance or my home instance, your same comment actually has the working URL. Something about how the post/comment were federated must have messed things up.

[–] elvith@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Last week I noticed that Lemmy doesn’t like certain characters when posting URLs and silently replaces them - in my case %20 got converted into + which broke my link. I experimented a bit with other „percent encoded“ values and there are more that get replaced.

I’m currently collecting a bit of data to open a bug report - links even get changed when put in a codeblock or inline code…

Check this comment out where I used every possible value from %00 to %FF in URLs. The second half (above %80) gets wild

https://feddit.org/comment/6990267

[–] Thief@lemmy.myserv.one 2 points 1 day ago

I took a look and its quite complicated to install requiring a very complex kubernates clustwr. Unclear why it is so disparate when something like nextcloud can be single containerised. I feel like this could be simplified for deployment.

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