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Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsAnd don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with starting a business rebranding Nextcloud and keeping your development closed source, as long as you're honest about that, which this initiative is not.
If you're looking for a Nextcloud hoster, there's a long list of partners here [2] that have contractually obligated themselves to contribute back to Nextcloud for every user they onboard.
What is Office EU?
Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on Nextcloud Hub. It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform.
Mostly adding this because I wasn't sure if it was a new product or not based on a first glance over the Office EU site. Nextcloud offers recommendations for providers on their site, most of which are in the EU [0]. The Office EU website seems to be new since around January of this year [1]. More managed hosts for Nextcloud is a good thing in my book, but I'd be a bit wary to host my stuff with a brand new provider.
[0]: https://nextcloud.com/providers/
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260116234614/https://office.eu...
This seems untrustworthy, double so for a product that claims to prioritize transparency.
> Our headquarters are in The Netherlands (The Hague). Contact us to book a meeting or ask any questions.
source: https://office.eu/contact
I'm european and can still easily confuse the "European Union" and "Europe the general area" when context is lacking, it's not a big stretch of the imagination for me that people _anywhere_ could construe this as "official" as well.
All that it looks like is backed by some emanation from the city of The Hague. No mention of the EU proper. It's european owned and backed, sure, but not EU owned and backed.
Tsh, marketing. (see Bill Hicks on marketing).
Issue is.. if you are a traditional MS Office "poweruser", the last thing you want to do is spend your days in a web browser. These apps should also be available as native apps, similar to MS Word, Excel, Pages, Keynote, etc.
e.g.:
- https://hostingdiscussion.com/news/european-cloud-workspace-...
- https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/empresas/amp/plataforma-offi...
And it seems to be repackaged Collabora (~LibreOffice):
> What are the pricing plans?
> Office EU will offer simple plans for individuals and teams. Pricing will be competitive and designed to be easy to understand. We will publish full plan details closer to launch.
> Will there be a free plan?
> A free plan is planned after launch. It will be a good way to try Office EU before committing. Exact limits and features will be shared when it is ready.
https://www.wordperfect.com/en/
https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite
https://www.hancomdocs.com/en/
As for open source as they claim ... can't find the code or a link to it on their site.
So far this smells like a lot of intent but I'm not sure what this is.
What we need to get independent is the public infrastructures.
That has nothing to do with current tensions between Europe and the US.
It’s just unbecoming of a nation to depend in its core on the good will of another.
I was also looking at infomaniak.com .
I'm trying to move away from MS 365 myself, both because of Trump, AI but also because Microsoft keeps making it work worse and worse with Firefox. The latest thing (as of a day or 2 ago) is every 30 minutes redirecting my outlook web to the "You just signed out of your account" page :( So I have to sign back in every time I use it, it used to simply stay open (and no settings were changed on the backend). How I hate these guys.
The most annoying thing is that none of this happens when I set my user agent to MS Edge on Windows. So they are purposefully breaking this.
Be careful.
rework it into a web friendly version.
what requirements does the EU have for not using libre office?
One thing this whole current shit show says is geopolitics are too unstable to put your data into any system or legal jurisdiction you don’t directly control.
With the university who trained these politicians, with the institutions who shaped them, with these politicians who created this multi-crisis - believing everyone out there was invested in a stable world as they were- a independent Europe is not possible. They just have to much hackable surface, to much API, they will crawl before any hacker offering them a way "back out" with the decades to come.
Seems a misstep to list an American AI provider first...
But I work in IT and Office 365 is not "Office suite online" anymore. Office 365 started with running Exchange in the cloud by MS as it is a PITA for IT. That was basically it.
Office 365 is now:
- Office suite, both online and desktop apps (Vital for full feature Excel)
- Entra for Users, Groups and Policy, SSO, conditional access, MFA (Entra is actually Azure AD, not sure if this is still the case but all Office 365 get an Azure AD tenant it runs on)
- Device management via Intune, that is policy, push apps/installs, reinstalls, Autopilot, run scripts etc on machines, device state config
- File sharing with Sharepoint & Teams & personal Onedrive (this also adds endpoint backup)
- Teams - chat, video, workspace - We live in Teams at work.
- Email (that includes admin, extensive admin)
- DLP - Data loss prevention
- The power suite where users & admins can make their own apps
+ MS Graph API for all this
Oh, and it comes with Copilot chat baked in (GTP 5.3 based now) with enterprise controls.
At a big company you can have people ONLY working on the Entra part to secure user accounts. Or people ONLY on Intune to setup and manage PCs, policy etc.
Office 365 is a beast and I will argue GSuite does not match up as companies basically HAVE to buy Slack on the side to get parity. Also sysadmin on GSuite sucks.
The link actually made me laugh but also sad. It is frankly embarrassing. We in EU can do tech Spotify, Klarna, Lovable, Mojang, Dice, Arelion, Ericsson and this is only in Sweden. Look at a 4G network, it is insanley complex.
So yea not sure what the solution is. But this is too little too late. It should have started in 2008 maybe they would have a chance. It is also sheer numbers. MS is massive and Azure/O365 is their cash cow now. They make sure it is damn good.
The enormous momentum of the installed base and occupied headspace of Microsoft systems made them lazy and complacent decades ago. They have been peddling insecure unreliable software for a generation now, and believed their was no viable threat.
It took too long, but finally. Trump and his mad bad actions are good for the Europeans like a heart attack is good for your health