Especially if other companies you have to interact with also use Teams, and Teams has the clear lower barrier to entry, let alone document sharing that's integrated into Word and Excel via SharePoint. Sure, it may not be sexy, but it heckin does work.
Yours seems to be the only comment in this threat with some real-world experience outside of software dev. I work in a large-ish company that does trade and manufacture. Most people here only know Microsoft products like Word and Excel. They have no concept of SharePoint, they barely know what OneDrive is, and there seems to be no way away from Excel.
The IT department has erected some network shares where all people just dump their files into folders and SharePoint actually seems like an improvement here, though I'm still on the fence about that. My own IT department seems to hedge a grudge against that too. But clearly, raw network shares can't be the solution either.
I've been a Linux fanboy pretty much my entire career when I worked in software dev, but since I've switched, I see the advantage and simplicity of all-in Microsoft. All our contacts use Teams as well. Other merchants, vendors, suppliers everyone uses Microsoft for E-mail and Teams for chat. If I wanted to introduce something like LibreOffice, Slack, Mattermost or RocketChat then I would face insurmountable obstacles within my own company. So why bother? If it works don't touch it.
Same question I've had in the other comment. What is your preferred alternative to SharePoint? Because we do need document sharing, and I don't see a viable way away from Excel for us. Right now we're sharing Excel files on network drives, which is horrible for versioning files, so I'd rather prefer something like SharePoint, but not from Microsoft. LibreOffice and Collabora don't seem to be there yet.
Personally, I am not a big fan of Microsoft, but in this case, my company is so entrenched in Excel that I don't see any alternative.
Yeah I don't yet have a great solution to that. We're not versioning docs well. I'm trying to drive adoption of nextcloud office (which is collabora I think) but haven't succeeded so far.
Serious question: what's your preferred alternative to SharePoint? We have an eclectic portemonteau of software, bookstack for docs, outlook and ms-365 for office etc. We're not a software company, think more mercantile and manufacture. We have a lot of stuff in excel, price calc, processes etc. I don't see a way away from excel. Currently we have all xls files on network drives, which is hard to maintain. Even though I'm not a Microsoft fan, I find myself pushing for SharePoint, simply so we can use the integrated share features in word and excel. LibreOffice and Collarbora don't seem to be there yet, even if I could convince people to switch from excel to Calc (and of our Ancient Wisdom Sheets would even work in LibreOffice).
a shared drive is much better than sharepoint. I don't see how sharepoint can make it easier.
the best alternative is using google workspace instead. it doesn't make you sign in four times a minute.
Google is completely out of the question. As I said, we cannot switch away from Excel, whether I like it or not. Google Sheets is not a viable option: Everyone in the company knows Excel.
Network shares aren't bad per se, but they encourage people to place multiple files with the same name and then a V4, V5, V6 etc suffix. People have to download or check out the Excel files if they want to work with them, delete their local copies when they are done, and make sure they always check out the most recent version. If multiple people have to edit an Excel file, they have to synchronize so they don't override each other's files. So yeah, network shares aren't bad per se, but they aren't ideal either. SharePoint has a clear advantage here.
I'm not usually someone who advocates for Microsoft, on the contrary actually, but in this case I don't see a really good alternative.
If you have a better workflow, please explain it to me.
Not only is that certainly not a fact, as the sibling commenter said, I find it striking how you're seemingly purposely missing the point.
They KNOW excel, they know where which buttons are, and the business logic and price calc are done in excel. These people aren't mentally challenged as you seem to think, they will know if their excel suddenly looks differently, offered by Google instead of Microsoft and in a browser instead of a native windows app.
So if you have nothing to contribute except power user arrogance, I will no longer interact with you.
> I find it striking how you're seemingly purposely missing the point.
Lol. You answer rude and get a rude response and then give up.
> They KNOW excel, they know where which buttons are
That’s not knowing excel though.
You’re not making the claim that people writing complex formulas with named ranges have an equation that doesn’t work in Sheet.
Sure, not specializing in computers doesn’t make you mentally challenged but it doesn’t make you proficient in it. If the reason somebody can’t use something is cause it “looks different” how have they survived the last 2 decades of Microsoft changes?
But the excel-boundedness is exactly my point. Several sheets are so large they have been split into three files, referencing each other or external sources via power query. I'm not even saying it's good like it is, but it's just the status quo. I don't see any viable way to turn away from Excel in the short term, which is why I seek solutions.
And knowing where which function or button is in Excel IS knowing Excel, and programming formulas, VB macros and power queries is knowing Excel too. It has been a cornerstone in this company for the past 20 years. These people aren't IT people, Their core skills and how they bring value to the company lie somewhere else, and that's perfectly fine too. but I cannot expect them to just change the software they're been relying on for years just because I say so.
Utter nonsense. I'm in Germany, and by law all displayed prices must include tax, groceries, gas, everything.
The gas station operators sometimes do put stickers like "this is how much tax is in the gas price you pay" on the actual pumps as if to blame the government for the greed of the large refineries. But here, after the strait of Hormuz debacle, we've actually had the government lower the gas tax for a while so that people who need their cars for work arent stuck with the higher bill so much. And what do you know, somehow the gas got a little cheaper, but not nearly by the amount of lowered tax. Guess who pocketed the difference.
Worse still, the government then enacted a rule that the gas price could only be raised once a day, but lowered any time. And in average, gas was even more expensive than before.
So yeah, I have trouble blaming the taxes for the high gas price.
And then it's - objectively! - not even true. That amounts to 3750 per computer. For a 4070, that's insanely expensive. You can get decent gaming pc with this card for less than a thrid of that, even in 2024.
I mean I have to admit this house looks live every geeks dream, but come on... Seven figure house price... In my country, most people don't make that much money in their entire working life. I do mean that literally, let's take "seven figure" as 4.5M. Evenly divided by 40 working years, that's 112.5k a year. That's almost double the median income. And I live in Germany, a nation that's considered rich.
FWIW, the 4070 was $600 at the time. You could indeed build a great gaming machine around a 4070 at much lower cost, but a few things inflated the price for me:
* I included the fairly nice 4k monitors ($750) in the price.
* The motherboards were stupidly expensive ($450) since I wanted something with 10G networking onboard, to support the netboot setup.
* The super-long fiber optic HDMI and USB cables are on the order of $150 each (and each computer needs one of each).
* Rackmount gear, which is stupidly expensive when purchased retail. (Datacenters obviously don't buy this stuff retail, so it's a weird market.)
* I think I included the networking gear and some other not-per-machine stuff in the figure. My spreadsheet from the time shows $3,067.64 per machine before tax.
(I am not trying to make any particular point here, just providing data for those who are curious.)
I really appreciate the answer and the detailed breakdown.
I should've stated more clearly what particular part of that statement I found untrue: the "computers being cheap" part when you pary 3k for a decent, but not great, gaming pc ;)
I absolutely believe that you paid 75k for 22 machines (I've used 20 in my post above in error). From the photos I can clearly and quite enviously see that no part of that setup could have been cheap.
You've hit the nail on the head. That's why I strongly preferred email and password login, backed by a keepass(xc) store to hold the data. Owned by me, backed up, impossible to take from me, the works. Sure, most of the time I have to verify my mail address, but after that the account is mine. Well, okay. On some services, I have to "confirm the new device" I'm loggin in from, so I still need access to my mail.
Weeeell... Some services I use seem to have switched to a magic link EVERY TIME for login. No password anymore at all. And all of a sudden, my mail account is the single point of compromise for these accounts.
And there is absolutely nothing that I can do. If the mail is hosted by someone else, they may terminate my account at a whim. Or give it to someone else who happens to have convinced my phone provider to hand them a sim card with my number on it. If I do self host I still need a domain, and I can never really own a domain, only rent it from somewhere. So, whenever that lease goes up, my account is compromised by default.
I really hate that this problem seems still unsolvable. Keybase had the right idea, but no one used it and they got aquihired by zoom during the pandemic...
When I try to use it, I have to sign up for at least the smallest AI subscription for 5 bucks a month (as opposed to the 2 I currently pay for storage). But when I do that with my regular account, I get the error message that my Google Pay money can only be spent in Germany, as if my account hadn't been registered in Germany for the past 20 years...
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