Re: A separate licence for Teams would be a bad idea for the public sector
I wasn’t suggesting a move away from the traditional MS Office suite (Word, excel, PowerPoint), merely noting that thanks to government shortsightedness it has locked itself into MS Office. Specifically, the finger can be pointed at Thatcher, who removed the teeth from the CCTA in 1989, which (combined with similar market lassie-faire in the US) had the effect of killing GOSIP and knock on effects on the IT user industry lead MAP/TOP initiative. Whilst many will remember OSI (ie. Networking protocols), the bigger part of these initiatives was the Standardisation of file formats used in manufacturing and technical offices. Obviously, we can look back over 30plus years and see the impact of the thinking “ let the market decide” and absence of any leadership by government has had…
Obviously, there are many reason why MS have done well, one of them is that they have been good at selling: bundling the separate products Word, Excel and PowerPoint into a single office suite(1990) Then adding to this over the years (eg. Outlook added in 1995), with Teams being one of the latest additions to this bundle. So those that had MS365 subscriptions, Teams was sitting there waiting to be discovered… Plus if you look at the effort MS put in to getting MS cloud adopted as the UK governments cloud platform..
CoViD: Much of government went with Teams, yet third-sector organisations (mostly without IT departments) went with Zoom and cursed having to use Teams with NHS/local government… however, you are right Zoom and Teams were life savers for many organisations that within weeks went to highly distributed working. If it wasn’t for Zoom and Teams, I expect many would have gone with Jitsi.
Having Teams unbundled would actually be good for the public sector, as then they would have to define requirements and go through a public procurement, resulting in a contract. Currently, MS can do what it likes to Teams as it’s “free” and not part of the contract (suggest you look at Vodafone and the termination of the “free” bundled email services to Demon customers a few years back…)
As for enterprise systems integration (10,000 plus users), spent circa 30 years doing that, so not unappreciative of the challenges your organisation faces.