Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that will be a big issue anyway.

"Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting"

If you claim, that this is my position, please read at least one more sentence

"So yes, one can (and should) build them. "

Good luck convincing the government (or local councils) of Bulgaria to migrate to an office suite that’s available in French or English only.

That’s beside the sibling comment’s point that this suite is not complete enough (yet).

What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!

Any insight in to why the finance department (and other departments) required MS office?

Today I opened a .docx file on libreoffice on my linux machine. Did a whole bunch of editing and sent back the file for some semi official purpose. And the .docx file behaved as usual on the windows machine of the sender. I mean to say for many many people the workflows will not suffer even one but. It's just too much automated people whose work may suffer initially b cause they are using windows API or something like that. But that's like just for developers suffering. Most govt offices or universities just work on individual files and that will never suffer even one bit

Is there a combination of open standards to drop in to replace AD integration with self management?

OAuth enabled systems aren’t enough, central management of users and machines are huge. If that core matures, it opens up the market for replacements in other areas. Teams, Outlook and the Office Suite need first grade replacements.

>There will be mountains of existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents that would need converting, as well as configured permissions structures and remotely managed laptop configurations that currently are working well

Well, they are not working well right now, because they could be rendered inoperable at any moment through Microsoft flipping a switch. That risk is real and has precedent (ICC having their Outlook access revoked).

>The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that time and money is best spent on this particular area.

When European sovereignty is on the line, it's never too expensive.

Exactly this. A while back, a greybeard told me "CVS never flew anyone to the Bahamas for a few rounds of bikini golf", when I was complaining about my employer picking the version control system and torture device "Serena Dimensions".

Someone yanked your chain with this one. Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft, these cases can't even register in the statistic of the total volume of orders. Every tech company would buy you a house if that worked, when a house is always a rounding error on the value of the contracts we're talking about.

They buy it because it's the "safe", "does everything" choice that "everyone else has". It's easier to deal with a single party than it is to get licenses and support from 20 other suppliers that then blame each other when there are issues at the border between 2 of the products. You can talk to anyone else who has Teams, your files are always fully compatible, all of the rest of your software integrates, single identity, etc. A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre Office when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS Office.

Users are proficient with the products, you can find skilled admins everywhere. Incumbency has a lot of inertia.

So you have to pay millions in support contracts every year, it's the cost of doing business. So MS gets hacked every other day, what could you have done about it better when even MS (!!!) couldn't?

I have worked in (German) Government, and apart from complacency (and maybe corruption, see Limux) there's nothing stopping the German government (at least at federal level) from adopting open source.

If processes depend on some crappy excel table (created by somebody 20 years ago) or even worse, sharepoint app (commissioned by people who shouldn't be deciding things like this), the processes suck and need to be rebuilt anyhow.

In what way do they need Microsoft Software or Technology except maybe Windows for their Passport Application?

That's special software developed for one customer only anyways. So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform or do this as some kind of WebApp.

And until then run some Windows Desktops for those special applications/services

Agreed. But Trump is the absolute last straw, and it seems some people needed that earthquake to finally wake up in the EU.

>Intune

Fleet

>Entra? (User management and policy)

LDAP

>Office 365 Exchange?

Dovecot, Postfix

>Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets)

Libreoffice calc, R and Python were needed. And if that doesn't work, finance needs to work around the vendor lockin

>Teams?

Matrix, Jitsi, Bigbluebutton, Mattermost

>Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?

Authentik, Keycloak for MFA/security, OpenZFS with Nextcloud/Opencloud for DLP

It's possible, though of course less integrated and more work involved than just selling your soul to MS. But I am sure that time will also solve that, now that people are more interested in open source.