- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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.
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.
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.