As you might know the entire European parliament (and council and commission) are stuck with Microsoft products for all clients. We have Linux for servers and such that the tech people tinker with, but us regular office drones have the pleasure of everyday being greeted by the Microsoft logo. The majority here in the parliament are stuck with Windows XP as their daily software diet. But not us, we have been upgraded! We had the fortune of being picked to be part of the testing group for windows 7. And here's my review of the experience so far.
Overall impression
So what's the big difference for a user when you log in? Desktop looks more or less the same, things function more or less the same as before. Nothing much has actually changed from the XP experience. Only difference is that the programs that comes with the package has been upgraded. Perhaps the start-up time is slightly shorter, but if so it is a marginal difference.
Web browser
This is probably the biggest change. In the XP environment of old we were all stuck with Internet Explorer and not allowed to add other browsers to the computer. But now in our new Windows 7 home we got Firefox installed from start. Personally I circumvented the old lock-in to IE by using Firefox portable, but now I can have the full foxed out browsing experience without any hassle. So a huge plus for this.
Mail
I have no clue what version of Microsoft Outlook was part of the old package, but upgrading to Outlook 2010 has been a blessing. No more random freezes of the program when you try to search through a large folder, a better team layout for the schedule and an overall much neater appearance. Only minus is that I don't like the new system of archiving emails that I need to keep (a necessity since the system automatically erases all emails not archived after three months) and also some buttons seems hard to find in the new layout. But all in all, a huge plus for upgrading the Outlook.
Office suite
I mainly use the Word and Excel tools of the office suite, and none of them have improved by the upgrade. Unintuitive menus and a huge increase in clicks to do anything is making the use of Word & Excel 2010 a pain to say the least. A huge minus for this.
Summary
I feel very lucky to be one of the privileged few to be included in the test group for Windows 7 and all the upgraded tools it brings. I would have felt even better if it had been in a free and open environment where I could choose any operation system I prefer, but if I'm going to be forced to use something that others have chosen for me it is definitely better to have something a little more up to date.
Exactly who is forcing you? And is it really allowed to force a MEP?
Mael: Yes.
Robert: Yes.
Steelneck: We are a large organization with many users. If all of them had root-control and could install whatever they liked, that would be a problem.
We have a form with which we can request non-standard software should we want to, but for various reasons this causes inconveniences - we don't get support, and we have to do version control and updates ourselves. If we freely were to choose OS on the end-user terminals, then also we'd be locked out of the intranet. So for instance, we have Ubuntu as an option on the laptops that each office can get exactly one (1) of, but if one opts for the Ubuntu-installation rather than the standard Windows installation (which has to be done by special request to begin with), one is not able to connect to the intranet or use the normal personal information manager/e-mail client, which is an inconvenience.
Robert: I think what you are calling for is an assessment of security versus transparency.
For instance, who has access to my e-mails? In the Swedish transparency framework (offentlighetsprincipen) all correspondence sent to a Swedish riksdagsledamot (parliamentarian) are by nature public documents. Would we accept it if our riksdagsledamöter encrypted their communications using asymmetric encryption to which only the riksdagsledamot held the private key? It would run completely contrary to the offentlighetsprincip so even if the individual riksdagsledamot would be more secure in their communications, it would harm transparency of the decision making institution.
The correspondence of people in powerful positions, such as myself, may indeed sometimes have to be somewhat more compromised. It is unreasonable for you to be addressing me in my capacity as an important powerful politician and expect that whatever influence you exert on me must go unnoticed to the surrounding world.
Nevertheless some of the questions you raise could of course be subject to relevant political scrutiny. Are we for instance making ourselves vulnerable to corruption with the IT Staff? Especially keystroke reporting could be one such concern - but a much larger concern with platforms such as the ones currently under developed for all mobile platforms (CommitteeEverywhere or something) is that they have no idea that the platform which they use as a base, be it Android or iOS, does not allow other applications on the same platform on the end-user device to do that kind of reporting!!!!
At the end of the day, it's a trade-off between accessibility and security, and I think a valuable lesson for everyone to bring with them is functional separation as a general principle for all communications industries to ensure the predictable and safe behaviour of tools on a diverse communications market.
steelneck: We have been in contact with the administration to ensure our speedy and adequate access to working tools of our choice. I'm also a patron of the European Parliament Free Software User Group. This has made a tangible impact on the ability for us to now use Firefox as one of our regular and standard working tools! I gave a particular address at FOSDEM this year about my work in that field, and my general observations on how the European Union deals with free software.
There have been accusations of bad management of the procurement procedures in the European Commission and DG DIGIT that were held in 2007, when the Microsoft contract was about to lapse. However, if I understand the reports from both FSFE and other entities, the problem is that no one is willing to challenge that procurement, which means that even if we believe it could very well be incompliant with the regulations for procurement of EU institutions, no one takes up the fight. So maybe your company will be willing to help FSFE out in finding someone to challenge DG DIGIT? I know they've been looking for a large number of years. :-)
I've been calling for those companies willing to challenge this to get in touch with FSFE for some time, but so far no success.
Correction: We do not have root control over our machines at the European Parliament and are not meant to have. I do not believe that the appropriate measures for me or my staff to undertake with respect to our work computers is to disrupt the security arrangements in the European Parliament intranet.
Do you really have to use the tools they tell you to use? Does Nils Torvalds actually sit in front of a Traf-0-Data client?
You're lucky to get a choice of browser in Win7, wasn't the case for a long time.
Not sure what you mean about not being able to install Firefox on WinXP - was that blocked by the EP?
Once again, exactly who is forcing you? Your answer Amelia is that you are basically doing it to your self out of convenient conformity, apart from being locked out from the intranet. Hwo is locking you out? Names please. Do not blame your behaviour on the system, that would make you an irresponsible apparanik, there are always real people to hold responsible for decisions.
You have root control over our own computer, but that does not mean that you have root control on other computers out on the open internet, and that largest network of them all do work just fine as you know, with fully empowered peers. Scaled down to an intranet should not make that any different done right. Someone has made _active_ decisions to build up a bad system within the organization, hwo are these people that want to lock you into a plattform? And since they force you to using software made up of secret code out of public scrutiny, one can imagine quite a lot of spying on high profile info from the plattform controlling part, no one is even allowed to even prove me wrong on that point. This is something really seroius with vast consequences for global politics and control in the world.
Amelia: Tyvm for the reply. Cory Doctorow "... if we have to be pure in order to fight, then we'll probably never succeed..." 51:45 into the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc . The percieved advantages of windows7 over windowsxp in the blog post are surely deceptive. Once the testing period are over you will lose priviledged treatment by the intranet, access to shared resources will slow down. Does the software report every keystroke to the server? When connected to the intranet, Does the software at all run on the client? Have you read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html . I would very much like to know more about how the MEPs are forced to do their computing, and who has access to the logs. And perhaps not just in this comment thread, but rather something from epfsug.
The choice to go with Microsoft was the result of the parliament procurement process. I don't know who made the specs for the procurement, and I don't know who decided on the outcome. But it was perceived at that time as a administrative decision, not a political one.
Mattias: "But it was perceived at that time as a administrative decision, not a political one."
Reminds me of this gem from Yes, Minister:
Sir Humphrey: "Yes, yes, yes, I do see that there is a real dilemma here. In that, while it has been government policy to regard policy as a responsibility of Ministers and administration as a responsibility of Officials, the questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts, or overlaps with, responsibility for the policy of the administration of policy."
Cernael: In some of my comments above, you can see what a person who is supportive of challenging of Commission procurement proceedings could do. According to one voice I heard, the problem is that most large actors who would be able to challenge to proceedings are unwilling to do so because it is to their disadvantage in other procurement proceedings. :-(
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