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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t the rest of the DoD uses Office? Is this not going to cause a bunch of interagency drama from having to convert documents from Docs to Office? (or is there some big button you can press in the GSuite admin console to say “make everyone save everything in Office format, yes, I know some features will work weird.”)

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I used to work for a big international company (+100k employees) that heavily used and depended on MS Office and migrated to Google Workspace. There was a lot of hesitance on the migration and also keeping the users engaged using it (I think that most of the people can not even imagine that there is something else besides Word and Excel) and it was one of the most successful decision I had seen for the users.

There is this irrational fear to stop using MS Office and to me the fear is now having to use it. I am not working with that company anymore and having to deal with Office again has been painful.

I just took a new job at a company that uses Workspace and it drives me nuts for two reasons. The biggest is that Sheets is awful compared to Excel.

The second is having work in a browser tab. It’s so much easier to keep things organized when switching around between programs when you have an actual app.

I hate browser based workflows purely because I need to wait a whole second or more every time a page loads.

Most operating systems let you use selected web sites as faux apps, and they get their own window and taskbar icon etc. it’s great for me to have GMail have its own window instead of buried within Chrome

The Google article links to the Army CIO’s post on this. He responded to a similar comment with the following

“Google Workspace does not replace Army 365. The Army has the world's largest Office 365 implementation with over a million users. This capability serves a niche user base with a unique set of requirements and complements our enterprise capability through Army 365. This is why we had the endorsement and support of the DOD CIO.”

Also, the current vision is to serve people with very limited needs (recruits in basic training is a prominent example). Seems like a heck of a negotiation lever though.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6982900...

> “The government has asked for more choice in cloud vendors…”

This was probably a major factor. Government, and more specifically DoD need more variety.

The important people will still have office. MS just wanted too much money for office365 licenses, so a bunch of lower enlisted just dont have email right now (because of no licenses). This will bridge the gap.

With the amount of restrictions, custom add-ins and specific workflows, it wouldn't matter that much since it's not even inter-office-compatible. Documents that need to be shared externally are generally converted and exchanged via a portal that does the actual release afterwards. For most documents that don't allow editing and only do form-filling after the fact they seem to prefer PDF over everything else.

I suppose the online variants of everything (with PWA support that is) all have the same benefit: easier to stream incremental changes to all users, and easier to centrally manage workflows and access control. Because nothing needs to be re-evaluated locally, you are only left with on-line verification and CAC verification/signatures.

The reporting is that they are using it for junior personnel who don't use collaboration feature regularly, just email for receiving (and occasionally sending) official communications. The idea is that anyone who would regularly needs collaboration capabilities gets an Office 356 license.

The perfect Wearable for the U.S. Army in the field is a ruggard Pixel device that dual functions as ceramic body armor plate in front of the heart but is dust and waterproof, floats like a kickboard, and the keyboard slides out HTC style as in the early model Nexus devices with a trackball to the side.

Exactly this, it makes no sense at all.

Integration between systems is not important. They SAY it’s important, but the current state of 8 different solutions for every need that are deployed say otherwise.

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