I'm genuinely curious to hear why it would be so hard to leave the Office 365 platform, to the point that it could mean have to shut down the company. I know it isn't something that can be done overnight, but this is on a whole different level than what I assumed the case to be. To make my question more concrete, let's say the EU gives you two years to move away from Office 365, why would this jeopardize your company?
Most corpos and banks are basically built on Excel, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, etc.
If you pluck that out it completely freezes 50%+ of their operations, people really don't get how much stuff in modern companies is reliant on MS stuff (and thus why they are one of the richest companies on the globe)
In some cases I would say yes if there was a hard limit (even few years) to migrate. Again, most people that didn't work in many really big corpos and banks don't comprehend how reliant those businesses are on the MS office stack.
Moving away from that would be a massive change management undertaking, but it's not the "Office" part which is our primary challenge. To be fair, I'm not sure we could actually survive the change management required to leave the Office and Windows part, as it would be completely unfamiliar territory for like 95% of our employees, but the collective we at least think that we can. We have quite a lot of Business Central 365 instances, the realistic alternative to those would be Excel (but not Excel). SharePoint is also a semi-massive part of our business as it's basically our "Document Warehouse".
I didn't know about business central, a quick Google search tells me it's an ERP. There are alternatives, but migrating an ERP is definitely more problematic than changing document storage and the applications you use to read and write documents. But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?
> But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?
You're not missing anything, but that's our current exit strategy none the less. We need to be capable of exiting Microsoft within a month if required. It even says Excel in our strategy even though it would obviously need to be a different spreadsheet program. Well, maybe we would be allowed to use non-cloud Excel, I'm not too sure about that actually. I'm only involved in these things from SWE side of things where I have to give them a strategy for our part, which is very easy because everything is containerized and almost non-platform dependent, so it would be relatively easy to migrate away from Azure. The biggest challenge for our part of the business would be our reliance on AD (well Entra ID) authentication flows. Not a big challenge as far as the actual auth flows, because we could easily accept tokens from something like Keycloak but it would be a challenge to migrate the AD for the SysOps guys.
Now I see the problem: migrating from an ERP to a spreadsheet in one month would be a hell. But with a longer timeframe, I think it would be possible to migrate to a proper ERP without missing key functionalities.
One very mundane reason a company I had worked for switched to Office365, was that emails from our own domain would often end up in the spam filter.
It can cost a lot when that happens.
I see this being a problem in the current situation, where most businesses use either Google or Microsoft for their emails. But in the case of an EU-wide change, I think the situation would be different. Plus, there are other providers that could be used that aren't blocked by MS' and Google's spam filters.
yeah, the real selling point of the google mail is that they have the power to just remove mail from other providers. Or the risk of removing is enough motivation of using gmail only. And as a major mail provider, they could change the ways we handle mail (to make it more reliable), they just choose not to.
They just mean that they would have to do real work and not just sit on their ass goofing off on the internet all day. Real work is something the last few generations are "allergic" to, it gives them the "ick". They somehow got it into their head that doing work is bad and that you should only rely on other peoples work, I blame Gates and public education.
I don't agree with this view. Saying that new generations are lazy compared to the previous ones is a complain as old as humanity itself, there are ancient writers that made the same complains centuries ago. Either you know their situation and you can provide some more detailed argument, or you are just assuming things you don't know.
