Another German state fails to replace Microsoft software

Gandalf_The_Grey

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In Germany, it seems ideology often gets in the way of practicability, at least for a while. The country is now somewhat famous for trying to replace Microsoft solutions with cobbled-together open-source software, which often leads to poor features, high support and training costs and an eventual return to Microsoft’s Office.

Today we have another telling of the familiar tale, this time about the German state of Hessen, who announced this April 2021 that they will be replacing Microsoft Teams in schools with a European solution that would comply better with European privacy standards. The deadline by the Ministry of Culture was the 31st of July 2021.

Initially, the process went well, and a local provider was quickly found. Unfortunately, a losing party in the tender process sued and won, and the tender process was reset. The result of this was that a replacement was not in place by the 31st of July, and Microsoft Teams continued to be used.

In the latest update of the process the tender process was once again stopped, as it turns out the specifications were not clear enough regarding the required functionality of the solution.
 

Freki123

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Yes and Germany is also the country where when the newspapers announce "the city administration got hacked" they ran windows and/or active directory.
It only took them 2 million Euro to get it running again. That would be a lot of training for employees and free software.
Rebuilding Landkreis Anhalt-Bitterfeld Found no english source for that sorry.

To get back to the article:
If the can't describe (in the official mandatory call for proposals) what they need from a software and check if the offer they want to use is suited for that it's more like a "user error" for me than a general MS is always good.
 
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upnorth

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Not sure what this has to do with ideology. Teams is not working well with Germanys privacy laws. They don't want to do something illegal.
Pretty much the same also in Sweden. Several major government agencies/organisations very recently decided to skip Teams and a few other MS services, simply because MS can't fully comply with GDPR. The data is being saved too much in the US as then it's automatic possible for example for NSA to gather and watch everything.

Teams is not a bad service by itself, and their developers constant works with it, but European laws/compliance also has to be followed.
 

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