I fully expect this to get backtracked almost immediately. From my experience most government employees can barely handle a browser upgrade with a UI change, and they will 100% throw a collective fit if their Word and/or Outlook goes away.
Which is good, since M$ Office is still one of (if not the) biggest security holes in all of software due to its macros and how no one uses them securely.
Also also doing things the OS way will lead to less changes in the long run since Microsoft can and will change their layouts as they please, but a well maintained FOSS-fork can stay one way indefinitely.
You are right. But what epic dunces.
Employer could pass the savings onto the staff with a payrise though.
“Staff who learn to use these new Linux applications will receive a bonus/payrise. Staff who do not will go to corner and wear the special hat”
I think trying to sell a switch to opensource as a saving is wrong on two counts…
Firstly it just sets the platform up for hatred. “We know you guys like expensive wine at the Christmas party, but this year we decided to get cheap-but-still-ok wine! Yaay, go team!”.
Secondly, any savings should be poured straight back into training and support. Users should be able to ask dumb questions like “how do I create a new word document” and get a more or less instant response.
Eh, it’s civil servants. They’ll be sent to training, if it turns out they can’t be trained they’ll have choice between quitting or working where their qualifications suffice. Vehicle registrations office on Heligoland, if need be.
justJanne@startrek.website 7 months ago
It’s not just office, SH has been slowly replacing the entire O365 suite with OpenDesk, which is an open source product based on Matrix, Jitsi, LibreOffice, and a few other tools.
The goal is to have a fully integrated solution for calender, chat, calls, documents, cloud storage, etc.
My employer is developing parts of that solution and we recently switched our internal communication over to it, and tbh, it’s working really well.
Now is the perfect point in time to do it, with the GDPR ruling regarding O365 and Microsoft fumbling the migration between old teams and new teams.