- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
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Yeah, this is how monopolistic digital companies operate. Every time you try and pivot from their bullshit “ecosystem” you encounter “technical difficulties” because they’ve surreptitiously extended their tentacles beyond their products. Getting off of these systems will take a concentrated effort and it’s unfortunate that governments just aren’t willing to do it.
Microsoft’s specification has previously caused problems for other vendors like LibreOffice’s The Document Foundation (TDF) too. There is some controversial history behind this feud between the two formats
No, there was no feud. What happened is that when Microsoft had to create an open document format that everyone could use, they purposefully made their format impossible to implement by anyone. IIRC, The open doc forma spec does it all and is 1500 pages large, whereas the Microsoft format doc is well over 6000 pages long and contains closed parts still anyways.
This is just standard Microsoft strategy and it worked again and dumb fucks again decided to stay married to Microsoft Microsoft because at apparently they love being abused
This is not particularly surprising since Collabora leverages the Open Document Format (ODF) rather than Microsoft’s proprietary OOXML specification. Microsoft’s specification has previously caused problems for other vendors like LibreOffice’s The Document Foundation (TDF) too.
While it seems elections killed this initiative, the above is why I recommended EuroOffice or OnlyOffice for converts. It has a more MS feel and much, much better support for conversions.
I’m still confused why TDF hasn’t put more time into opening other formats.
You can be sure Microsoft was working its utmost hardest to make this not work, and make it look bad. All the more reason to get away from them as fast as possible.
The best way is to stop using office documents altogether. It’s legacy computing that at shouldn’t be needed any more.
This is borderline fake news. This pilot project was launched poorly by the ministry responsible for digitisation because the minister wanted his own project running so he could bash other ministries for not doing anything. It’s ironic, like rain on your wedding day.
There are multiple pilot projects across the Danish range of ministries. Many are in much better shape because they’ve actually been thought through: example
100% it was a hot dumpster fire of a Sharepoint deployment that made it impossible to migrate.
Has anyone discovered exactly what SharePoint does yet? /s
I could easily believe that it was more work than they expected and so they decided that it wasn’t worth it after all, but man. Do it anyway.
Satya Nadella pets a white cat.
How big was the bribe?
I genuinely, genuinely don’t understand the need for microsoft office. A text editor has sufficed for everything I have ever wanted to do.
Excel spreadsheets bigger than databases. And the userbase doesn’t know any other options because of monopoly.
It’s actually amazing that Microsoft has been able to keep their users inside their walled garden for so many decades. When I was a teenager in the 90s, the same argument was used… That their users don’t care to look for other options. And it’s as true now as then.
EU leaders are lying to you. This is a global class war.
So TDF has a fascinating article on their blog discussing how the Austrian military made the switch. It took a lot of planning and there was a huge amount of work to help move people along.
I suspect this may not have been the case here. But I’m sure we’ll find out the gory details soon enough
I swear I have been reading this article for 20 years. Some gov org balks at Microsoft cost and pitches free alternative. They dont plan on spending extra to complete the transition and then dont adequately train or build out the infrastructure.
Replacing an intrenched system with a free software alternative successfully will require more money in the first few years, not less.
They’re getting threatened by the US and they can’t even change a word processor, lol good luck to them
Did MS offer them a huge deal?
Only some vacations for deciders.
One thing I hate, but came to understand about governments and big companies, - is that they only leave stuff if it starts falling apart under them due to lack of support and growing incompatibilities.
Because otherwise the “technical problems” in the title can possibly be one Excel spreadsheet that turned out to not be bug-to-bug compatible when opened in LO.
And now I’ve read the article, and with the exception of Collabora instead of LO, this is even dumber, they’ve cancelled the pilot due to “formatting issues”. Even after looking a bit at big companies I think they are f-ng parasites and should have somehow gotten used to those “blank pages”, thank you very much.
That’s an excuse. I say continue the pilot, and fire the focus group of 38 lazy ministerial jerks.
But OK, I’m not a Danish citizen, so please be my guest, you hypothetical Danish citizen reading this, to borrow my opinion.
Used to work IT for american municipalities. I can guarantee you that if a single sheet looked at all different, id get a call. They mindlessly press the same 4 buttons they know how to press and ignore everything else until it “breaks”
Used to work IT at a university during the transition time from Win 3.11 to Win95. The amount of emotional hand-holding (not even so much technical support) involved in getting the admin staff through the process was unbelievable to me at my young age. Now I understand, but back then I was expecting way more “this doesn’t work” or “I can’t find this program” and way less “I don’t know how I’m going to do my job.”
Cause the way UIs look when you want to do a job are discarded as “by programmers for programmers and not normal people”, and UIs making an illusion of things working by themselves by intuition of the user and hiding specific actions are considered “user-friendly”.
UIs intended for people to do their jobs look, as an extreme, like
ed. Less extreme - WordPerfect. XEphem, XGrace, Lisp environments. Those are what you come up with when you want a kiosk, but with a clear idea of a workplace supported by it, or an expert workplace where you do a job.While things like MSO, Telegram, today’s web browsers, and so on - they are intended for people who don’t want specifics. They want the illusion of fuzziness of what they are doing.
