Lyon Abandons Microsoft Office To Strengthen 'Digital Sovereignty'
- Reference: 0178180418
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/25/1757229/lyon-abandons-microsoft-office-to-strengthen-digital-sovereignty
- Source link:
[1] https://next.ink/brief_article/lyon-abandonne-microsoft-office-pour-renforcer-sa-souverainete-numerique/
Can they really use OnlyOffice from Russia? (Score:3)
Lyon is 3rd largest city in France, population 520,774 (2022).
"Behind OnlyOffice hides the Company Ascensio System SIA, which have their Headquaters in Riga (Latvia) and London (Great Britain). The Company however is russian. Because of that OnlyOffice falls under the sanctions imposed by Germany together with the EU against Russia."
[1]https://www.en-zdv.uni-mainz.d... [uni-mainz.de]
So can France really use it?
[1] https://www.en-zdv.uni-mainz.de/2023/05/30/software-onlyoffice-will-be-switched-to-the-open-source-version/
Re: (Score:2)
Reply to self. As mentioned in the link above, the open source version is not under the sanctions.
Re: (Score:2)
This. According to Wikipedia: "Due to EU economic sanctions targeting Russia, European organizations that used the commercial version of OnlyOffice were prohibited from doing so"
So I am guessing they went self-hosted route then?
Re: (Score:2)
They say everything is hosted in regional datacenters and all companies are national (therefore not the original OnlyOffice publisher from registered in Latvia). List of contractors [1]https://territoirenumeriqueouv... [territoire...eouvert.fr] They're a eleven companies named, no point to name them here, just local companies that do cloud stuff and training.
[1] https://territoirenumeriqueouvert.fr/partenaires/
Mr. Sparkle Office? (Score:2)
He predicted it in the Futurama crossover. But will it run DOMO? Just kidding, I'm sure the sysadmin in Lyon reads Breitbart like a WWIII solder.
"Nobody puts Visio on a hot dog!" (Score:3)
There are theoretically lots of programs in Microsoft Office, but all most people use is Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Word can make documents that are prettier than a text editor. But none of it is really necessary. You could use Notepad.exe to convey the same information, and nothing of value would be lost.
PowerPoint is used for making slideshows, not one of which has ever contributed anything positive to any human endeavor. People use it a lot in an educational context, but it's terrible at it. You'd be better off just talking. PowerPoint puts the audience to sleep. Even sales would secretly be better off without it, though salespeople will never admit it.
That leaves Excel. Unlike the other two, Excel is focused on content, rather than style. And boy, does it show. Most people don't even use it to do math; they just like the grid formatting. In any event, I'm sure that the open-source replacements can handle all the calculations fine, and it's not like they have to even be pretty to be a workable replacement.
Slide 5: In conclusion, Microsoft Office provides no value, and people who are addicted to it are just using style to hide their content's complete lack of substance.
Re: (Score:2)
I think I would trust "Pseudonymous Powers" advice more than yours. He makes reasoned arguments to justify his statements. How valid they are is up to the reader to decide.
Your counter advice appears to be your personal and very specific recommendation on porn choices, which says more about you and how weird you are.
I'm guessing you weren't on the debating team at school...
Re: "Nobody puts Visio on a hot dog!" (Score:2)
PowerPoint is used for making slideshows, not one of which has ever contributed anything positive to any human endeavor.
Thank you very much. No need to add anything further.
Ok, one thing:
don't use powerpoint ... ever.
I'm done now .
Re: (Score:2)
Let me counter your argument with this powerpoint presentation on why powerpoint is so great...
Hey you in the back! Yes you you big hairy gorilla, wake up, there is only 42 more slides to go!
Re: (Score:2)
In the hierarchy of unspoken IT crimes one should never commit making a PP presentation is ... probably below choosing Ubuntu for embedded systems development... uh.. ok around the same level of retar--- umm --- it's bad! Very bad!
Also. You woke me up!!
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, I guess I forgot about Outlook. Outlook is used to not read emails. And to set meetings which could have been emails that nobody reads.
Re: (Score:2)
> You could use Notepad.exe to convey the same information, and nothing of value would be lost
I am tired of too many "geeks" thinking that the only information in a "document" is the text. Text is important, but so is formatting. Layout conveys meaning in ways that just the text does not (print-based newspapers knew this long ago... what is above the fold mattered more than what was below). It is similar to "data". A table of data can convey meaning, but an appropriate graph will often do the job much, much better even though technically it is the same information.
Presentation matters.
American (Score:1)
How are they going to identify all the American contributions to Linux and strip them out to achieve their aims ?
Re: (Score:2)
I get you're trolling, but still:
Digital sovereignty means "running locally", and that no external entity can pull the plug on my software.
The more do it, the better (Score:3)
The critical mass for people realizing Microsoft is far too expensive for what they deliver and has all these problems from being an US company is not that high. I would expect that 1% or less of Europen cities would be far more than needed. And at that time, the illusion of MS crap being "without alternative" will collapse.
Re: The more do it, the better (Score:1)
The most mission critical parts of most companiesâ(TM) enterprise spend has nothing to do with these applications. Lyon now needs to implement a dogs breakfast of email, chat/collab, cloud storage/sync, meetings, before you even get to security and data control. Microsoft Word is perhaps the least interesting product Microsoft makes
Re: (Score:2)
The awarded contracts include: Zimbra, Matrix, Nextcloud, Jitsi.
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I see you have eaten up the crap that MS marketing fed you.
I still miss an MS Access equivalent (Score:2)
> ...The city aims to "no longer be dependent on American software solutions and acquire true digital sovereignty," according to an official statement.
While I applaud the city for this move, I miss an MS Access equivalent on Linux. In short, there's none that comes close.
There have been efforts in this direction though...
[1] Gambas [gambaswiki.org]
[2] Lazarus [lazarus-ide.org]
[3] Kexi [kexi-project.org]
All these show promise, though more serious work is needed.
With Access, one could choose what backend to employ. It still remains an formidable solution for many small office database problems especially with the ability to program business logic into the frontend and report generation.
[1] https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html
[2] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
[3] https://kexi-project.org/en/
Should have talked to Munich first (Score:1)
They tried that.
Re: (Score:2)
If at first you do not succeed , try, try again.
Re: (Score:2)
1) It was over a decade ago, things have really changed. 2) Munich migrated end users to Linux, which they don't do here.
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience the first step to moving people to Linux is first move them to cross platform apps on their existing OS and give them time to get used to that change. Then the change to Linux is less jarring and makes the OS change go smother as their apps feel familiar and that is where most people spend most of their time.
Making too many significant changes all at the same time is going to get push back from users.
Re: (Score:3)
Different political environment. With the WTFs coming from Washington, this appears to be politcally motivated ("digital independence") as opposed to the previous (Munich) effort's financial motivation.
It would be difficult for MS to offer big enough discounts to cover a decree of "No Software From the USA"
OnlyOffice (Score:3)
Sounds like a site where people can ogle documents and spreadsheets -- those blank ones leave a LOT to the imagination ... :-)
A "Windows 11" effect is implied (Score:2)
"Prolong the lifetime of computer equipment and thus reduce their environment footprint" (my translation) [1]https://www.lyon.fr/actualite/... [www.lyon.fr]
[1] https://www.lyon.fr/actualite/action-municipale/la-ville-de-lyon-renforce-sa-souverainete-numerique
Good move. (Score:2)
This is a good move. Now everyone outside the USA needs to do the same thing. The USA is no longer a trustworthy partner and you really don't want to risk the USA shutting down your operations if King Donald gets in a snit at you.
I've de-Big-Tech'd my personal life [1]to quite a large extent [skoll.ca].
[1] https://dianne.skoll.ca/writings/de-googling-my-life/
Google translate of article (Score:2)
[1]Note: google translate [translate.goog], so not the best, but at least it's better than French. I hope it made something of it.
[1] https://next-ink.translate.goog/brief_article/lyon-abandonne-microsoft-office-pour-renforcer-sa-souverainete-numerique/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=nl&_x_tr_pto=wapp
It's not about the software (Score:3)
It's about the file format. I would expect this OnlyOffice thingy supports odf, but does it default to saving in this format? Otherwise they'll be replacing the plague with cholera.
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest, exchanging files with people is less important than it was 10 years ago. I suspect that any inevitable incompatibilities between the formats will not actually be of any importance. It's not as if you care how well it prints.
Re: (Score:2)
The feature of Onlyoffice is that it uses MS format (docx etc.) as the default file format. In my experience this does result in OnlyOffice being more compatible with MS Office files. I've seen it be better in layout, as well as media embedded in i.e. ppptx.
So it makes sense in that you get a lot less blow back from users that could care less about sovereignty. I personally have been mainly using LibreOffice and its predecessors all the way back to StarOffice so I do prefer Libreoffice, but if you have to s
Re: (Score:2)
As much as I support the idea of LibreOffice, "Calc" is just too different from Excel. Word processors are a dime a dozen, no one really cares enough, and I would prefer LaTeX anyway... But spreadsheets basically need to be standard, even down to the keyboard shortcuts... And for what it's worth, Excel is the standard.
(more recent versions of Excel are, sadly, increasingly enshittifying, though, with all the "integrated" features... 2016 was probably the last great version)
Re: (Score:1)
The last great version of Excel was 4.x.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you should get an upvote as "Informative" as I didn't know. I think the last time I used Excel was over 10 years ago and I switched to Calc. For me there was no real difference and I would assume that is still true today for casual users. It is more power user that would notice. By power users my threshold would would be quite low, as being someone who used a spreadsheet often enough to learn the less common keyboard short cuts.
Being pedantic it doesn't matter what the standard is, it matters
Re: (Score:2)
If we were to go back to 2007, ODF should have won. But OOXML is an open standard from ECMA and ISO/IEC, so it's not really an issue for lock-in.
The real source of lock-in is macros in spreadsheets.
Re: It's not about the software (Score:2)
Give them 5 years before they go back to office