Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
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Can Dutch higher education part ways with Microsoft? The sector is trying to break free, and alternatives are being explored here and there. At the same time, more and more tasks are being completed by Microsoft tools.

Can Dutch higher education part ways with Microsoft? The sector is trying to break free, and alternatives are being explored here and there. At the same time, more and more tasks are being completed by Microsoft tools.

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    9 hours ago

    Yes and no; the main issues are:

    initial disruption (e.g. ditching teams is harder than it looks, you also need to retrain all your IT staff)

    User training (most staff can barely use Microsoft products - even light terminal use is seen as magic)

    Industry demand (your average CEO conflates “computer competent” with “can you use ms office?”)

    Functionality loss (mostly in easy document collab and cloud storage)

    Existing 3rd party software contracts (yeah, DRM software hates Linux, also most are locked into azure)

    Accountability (if OneDrive gets hacked, Microsoft pays out (i.e. no-one pays), if your cloud server gets hacked you pay out)

    I’ve scratched the surface there, there are a lot more issues. The truth is that universities need to take this step, however the barriers are just too high during the perpetual crisis academia currently exists in - it would mean years of disruption they simply cannot afford.

    • Thorry@feddit.orgEnglish
      6·
      5 hours ago

      Yeah Microsoft doesn’t just offer software, they offer an ecosystem. That includes hosting, support, training, SLA, legal liability and interoperability. They also do a LOT of customisation for large companies and governments, much more than one would expect for a company that’s perceived as rigid as Microsoft.

      I’m sure for a lot of the software we can find replacements in the non-Microsoft sphere, but that just leaves a bag of assorted pieces of software. That’s not enough and I’m not sure we can find replacements that match the user requirements for everything. That means we need different replacements for different companies/governments, which would lead to a big mess that nobody could ever maintain. And how is anyone going to get it to the level they feel comfortable agreeing to an SLA and liability?

      So in my ideal world, all the EU countries get together and invest big into some kind of standard on how software like this should work and how it all works together. That would allow different companies to build software for different use cases, smaller parts of the whole, and through the standard all work together in a way that actually works. Then we can have service providers that create and perhaps partly customise an environment for a company or government. They can provide the training, support, SLA and the legal stuff. There would obviously need to be subsidies available for all of these companies to get to work on this. I would like the standard to require the whole stack to be open source, but that might be hard.

      Now I realise this is really naive and has a couple of issues. First of all, is it even humanly possible to create such a standard? Something that isn’t super complicated and not overly restrictive to completely kill any innovation? And how long does it take to create something like that? We don’t have 10 years to work on it, the world moves too fast for that. Second issue is what companies would be willing to work on this? Even with subsidies, there wouldn’t be a lot of money to be made, no vendor lockin, no competitive advantage. Which is good for the side of the user, but not as good for the side of the supplier. Third issue: EU countries working together? Well good luck with that, on a good day it’s like herding a bunch of cats. I’m sure in three years we can have proposal tabled to put to a preliminary vote.

      So yeah I’m not sure how we get out of this mess. It’s a lack of foresight and the fact governments move slow and the world moves faster and faster that got us to this place. If we had restricted Microsoft back in the 90s, things might have been different. We should not have bought in to the whole “Safe Harbor” thing, but that’s easy to say after the fact.

      • HexesofVexes@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        5 hours ago

        I think there is another alternative to plain government spending, and that’s inter-university cooperation.

        It’s pushing FOSS options for education on the comp sci departments, and collaborating to make it work there.

        It’s is then gating every advance behind a “non-commercial, education only” license a bunch of law departments glue together.

        From there, it’s universities actively allocating staff workload to help maintain key FOSS infrastructure.

        From there you’ve laid the foundation on which things can be built.

      • fatalicus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        7 hours ago

        Yeah, there is plenty of systems who do the things that Microsoft does.

        But I don’t know anyone who does it all so integrated as Microsoft does.

        Let’s say you start with the basic: you need office apps, email and storage. You have several who sell systems like that, many of them cheaper than Microsoft.

        Then you want security for your email. Iyou can go out and find some supplier for something like that, or you can buy an extra license and get EOP.

        Then you need client protection. You can go out and find a supplier, or you can buy a license and get endpoint protection.

        And since you now have EOP and endpoint protection, you can just buy the security step up from Microsoft, and you get a whole bunch more security solutions, all integrate.

        Oh and you need dataloss prevention and other such compliance solutions, so might as well go for E5, so you get whole compliance package.

        I really wish that someone could give Microsoft proper competition, because they really need it, but as it is right now, there just isn’t any unless you want to do a lot more work than it is to go for Microsoft.

        • Thorry@feddit.orgEnglish
          4·
          6 hours ago

          And on top of that these days we don’t want any software running locally, it all needs to be in the cloud. So we have thin clients connecting to virtual desktops for the end users. And guess what, that’s all Microsoft as well. So then you’d need a whole stack to replace that, which then includes hardware vendors providing something that works reliably with your own custom stack. Microsoft has so much of the needs covered, it’s so much harder to select a different provider for anything, as it complicated everything. Which is by design of course, but still the reality we need to deal with.