>There will be mountains of existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents that would need converting, as well as configured permissions structures and remotely managed laptop configurations that currently are working well

Well, they are not working well right now, because they could be rendered inoperable at any moment through Microsoft flipping a switch. That risk is real and has precedent (ICC having their Outlook access revoked).

>The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that time and money is best spent on this particular area.

When European sovereignty is on the line, it's never too expensive.

Exactly this. A while back, a greybeard told me "CVS never flew anyone to the Bahamas for a few rounds of bikini golf", when I was complaining about my employer picking the version control system and torture device "Serena Dimensions".

Someone yanked your chain with this one. Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft, these cases can't even register in the statistic of the total volume of orders. Every tech company would buy you a house if that worked, when a house is always a rounding error on the value of the contracts we're talking about.

They buy it because it's the "safe", "does everything" choice that "everyone else has". It's easier to deal with a single party than it is to get licenses and support from 20 other suppliers that then blame each other when there are issues at the border between 2 of the products. You can talk to anyone else who has Teams, your files are always fully compatible, all of the rest of your software integrates, single identity, etc. A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre Office when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS Office.

Users are proficient with the products, you can find skilled admins everywhere. Incumbency has a lot of inertia.

So you have to pay millions in support contracts every year, it's the cost of doing business. So MS gets hacked every other day, what could you have done about it better when even MS (!!!) couldn't?

Evolution has worked with every corporate environment I’ve been in since 2003. Mail, calendar, contacts, tasks has always worked great, including companies that have used outlook, Google, and others.

I personally don’t love thunderbird, but what is it missing?

Gnome through their online accounts supports most major corporate providers which has calendars showing up in evolution, the dedicated calendar app, and in the status bar of gnome shell.

>Intune

Fleet

>Entra? (User management and policy)

LDAP

>Office 365 Exchange?

Dovecot, Postfix

>Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets)

Libreoffice calc, R and Python were needed. And if that doesn't work, finance needs to work around the vendor lockin

>Teams?

Matrix, Jitsi, Bigbluebutton, Mattermost

>Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?

Authentik, Keycloak for MFA/security, OpenZFS with Nextcloud/Opencloud for DLP

It's possible, though of course less integrated and more work involved than just selling your soul to MS. But I am sure that time will also solve that, now that people are more interested in open source.

I have worked in (German) Government, and apart from complacency (and maybe corruption, see Limux) there's nothing stopping the German government (at least at federal level) from adopting open source.

If processes depend on some crappy excel table (created by somebody 20 years ago) or even worse, sharepoint app (commissioned by people who shouldn't be deciding things like this), the processes suck and need to be rebuilt anyhow.

In what way do they need Microsoft Software or Technology except maybe Windows for their Passport Application?

That's special software developed for one customer only anyways. So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform or do this as some kind of WebApp.

And until then run some Windows Desktops for those special applications/services

Agreed. But Trump is the absolute last straw, and it seems some people needed that earthquake to finally wake up in the EU.