Microsoft-less office?

Well, we're a Microsoft-less shop, using (as you mentioned), Okta, Slack, confluence, and lucid chart. But we use Gmail, Google calendar, Google drive, and sheets / doc / presentation. The spreadsheet is the big one I'm not sure what you do if you don't want Excel and don't want sheets.

We have a customer that is 100% Linux and it is an incredible pain in the ass from the end-user training side of things but it does work pretty well.

Also, I'm not sure based on my experience with clients that use Box and Dropbox that I would chose them over a well done SharePoint/ODFB setup. Especially Dropbox. And if you're already that far in you might as well just use the whole stack while you're at it.

What are you doing? Because that's what it usually boils down to: are you and your employees able to learn new software that gets the job done? That includes even questioning the "best of breed" substitutes that you mention. What are you really doing with data and document formats that either requires ceding control of critical infrastructure to another company, or requires you to bring that processing in-house (to a greater or lesser degree)?

Generally, I would argue that the better approach to take is from a risk mitigation perspective. Consider the scenario where you have no choice but to keep your business running despite some disaster that prevents you from otherwise using your platform(s) of choice. In doing that evaluation, you may just discover some alternatives that are better everyday solutions than what you're using now. Regardless, the exercise is not simply to switch one monoculture for another, but to be open to any and all possible innovations that can improve your business.

Any basic office productivity product (Word, Excel, etc...) that isn't MS is substandard and will result either in an efficiency hit, quality hit, or both.

The best part of Outlook is not the email client, but seamless calendar and active directory behavior. (I don't know what other alternatives are these days to full featured Exchange).

It's been a while since I last looked, but Dropbox and similar couldn't meet federal requirements for data security - but OneDrive could. Might matter depending on who pays you.

So get that far with the features - plus the cloud advantages of O365 vs. discrete licenses for Office and MS becomes an easy choice even if you are also running other services like Okta. And on the enterprise level MS does offer a lot of flexibility with self vs cloud hosting, interfaces with other vendor software, etc...

So that gets you back to your frustration, but you should be able to negotiate pricing based on the other tools you use... if you're big enough to negotiate with Microsoft.

Startups generally aren't big enough to negotiate and generally don't have the time to mess with stuff that doesn't just work out of the box for every user without additional training. So unless the startup naturally hires an exclusive Linux crew because of what they do...

Doesn't mean it's impossible, but...

Microsoft-less as in the title is definitely viable. I have worked on a few companies that used Google Workspaces, and while you would expect to see people fighting over scraps of food, mutants, and biker gangs terrorizing everyone, it was just life as usual. As a dev, I've also worked since 2011 in companies where people had Linux workstations, and yeah, there's the occasional issue and mismanaged stuff, but I've also seen plenty of Windows desktops mismanaged (e.g. applied some physical crap [glue?] to USB ports so people wouldn't connect their phones to the corp laptops to comply with regulation).

Now, OUTSIDE Google... there have been a couple of articles talking about Zoho in Africa being the #1 choice- also because Zoho focuses on that market and it has the "right" integrations, so I have no idea how viable it is in other places.

As usual, it depends a lot on your business. Migrating is always going to be a huge pain- if not inviable. But starting from scratch, you at least have the Google choice. And probably in some lines of business you need Microsoft (or even Macs, or Linux).

(Edit: and it's been a couple of orgs now where... email is residual, and calendar use is not a lot. Word processing is also rare. Spreadsheets are more common, but I've also seen places which really didn't use them.)

I looked into contact/calendar management outside of exchange/google and it doesn't really exist. By 'not exist' I mean, it seems clear and common knowledge over 90% of people that work with IT in the world I know use either goog or ms, end of story. You'll always find some hobbyist or contrarian to tell you good alternatives exist, but they're either lying or they don't understand the problem. It seems a pretty clear cut example of how tech is controlled my monopolistic gatekeepers in venues other than the social media rodeo.

Related to this is the state of email, how it's been reduced to just a few providers serving the vast majority of people, and its importance has reduced enough for it to be embraced and extended to oblivion. I tried to help some people move data out outlook 2007 recently, and discovered the new outlook not only could not read or import PST files, but required you to upload all of your email data to MS's servers for them to use. I also noticed some MS offering, I think outlook.com, would not allow you to add any 3rd party email account to be used with outlook.com... unless, of course, it was google's offering. You could add a gmail/google account, I guess they need a way to offer migration out from their only competitor in that space. I think the writing on the wall is that email has been replaced by google or ms groupware and is effectively dead, unless you're an open source zealot and avoid their offerings on principle, something that soulless businesses & corporations will carry no water for.

For personal needs I ended up using radicale ( pip install radicale ) in a container, and I talk to it over wireguard. This allows me to access the same contacts and calendars from my laptop, desktop, and phone, and even share them with my partner if they want the wireguard/davX .

I recently had to contact a very small business that prominently used a Proton Mail address. Being the kind of place that deals with confidential and sensitive information, I think that was a good look for them. If they had been much bigger, I would have thought it weird for them to not having their own domain name in the address though. So, there are niches where little things like that are reassuring to people that despite being small and not IT focused, they're probably not leaving default admin passwords laying around all over their back end.

But if it were an IT shop I'd totally expect a custom domain even if they used something like Proton on the back end.

wrong thread