
Re: A separate licence for Teams would be a bad idea for the public sector
I've worked with several organisations who have tried to move away from Office it's just been impossible. one organisation ended up licencing every desktop for Gsuite and Office. The simple fact of the matter is that if you run large Scale IT organisations supporting many thousands of users and hundreds of applications it is impossible to remove office without a disastrous effect on the end user experience. I'm a Project Manager working with a variety of organisations but the reliance on a minute by minute basis on the ability to extract data, produce letters, send emails etc from corporate apps is business critical, there is no other office which offers this level of integration reliably. it may work 90% of th time once you have worked with the 3rd party software provider to perform the integration but you'll be running a non-standard configuration and that will cause issues around application patching and upgrades. In the real world of Corporate IT most of us are implementing Commercial Off The Shelf software and for anything less than a multi billion pound a year turnover company I'm doing it with out of th ebox configurations and workflows restricting changes to 'personalisation' to fit the organisation standards. We do not have the resources for anything else, our developers are working full time on the 'niche' applications which are required to run a particular process peculiar o the organisation or plugging gaps in the COTS offering to allow better intra application integration.
At a personal level I've been working with Gsuite for 10 years and the spellcheck is still not good enough, I have mild dyslexia and lean heavily on the spell check tools, the quality of work I can produce is measurably lower on G Suite because of this and I have to rely on more colleague support for proof reading which i a real cost in terms of productivity. During COvid, the County COuncil I was working with had to move from having 3-400 remote workers to several thousands over a 2 week period, at the same time it was battling to realign service provision to our most vulnerable citizens to protect both them and our staff, we had to close day centres, change the way home care was delivered and deploy a couple of thousand laptops and PC's. Th IT team did a fantastic job supporting this initially, then developing a volunteering application to allow voluntary organisations to co-ordinate the pandemic response but the fact that we could hugely ramp up Teams usage by just increasing the size of the internet connectivity was an absolute life saver. I' a pragmatic user of microsoft services, dislike a lot about the companies practices but suggesting that adding additional costs to using Teams would increase competition in the corporate sector is just naive.