How to work in Ubuntu Desktop while the Organization uses Microsoft

This post is quite personal...

I really do not like Microsoft products. Their PMs had built their products for the lowest possible common user, the products are full of bugs, they keep changing the products behavior in a zig-zag manner, and they allow full control on your desktop when you're working in an organization.

Several years ago, when all my colleagues were using Microsoft Windows, I've switched to Ubuntu desktop. It was a great relief, it was faster, it was simpler, and it was intended for a human who uses his brain. I like it.

But then, as years went by, the organization had restricted more and more of the IT infrastructure and services to be limited to Microsoft products. And throughout this, I had to survive with my Ubuntu.

In this post I will present show of the tricks I've used to survive. This is not the final word though. I might lose the ability to work at all, and will be forced to use Microsoft Windows, but for now I am still using an OS intended to be used by thinking humans.

Outlook

The first thing that went off is outlook. Microsoft office is not supported for Ubuntu in an easy way, and mail is a must have requirement to live in an organization. The bypass is to use Office 365 on the web. It is more basic than the fat Outlook client for windows, but it supplies all the functionality you need. It also has less bugs than the fat client, though it is still much more buggier than a KISS gmail web client.

The other issue for outlook, is that the organization uses both MFA and timeouts session every 10 minutes (come on? IT team? are you real??). So I had to re-login to the web interface and authenticate using my phone all day long. This is very very annoying. The bypass here is to keep the session alive using the Firefox extension mSession Keeper. To configure it use the following settings:

• Start session URL: https://outlook.office.com/mail/
• Stop session URL: https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/logout
• Ping URL: https://outlook.office.com/owa/
• Ping interval: 1 to 3 minutes

Microsoft Teams

Communication through Microsoft Teams is required for some meetings. But for some wonder reason, Microsoft had made an effort to support it directly on Ubuntu. Just follow the instructions in this link.

In recent time, the organization IT had explicitly blocked usage of Teams on Ubuntu :(

To bypass this, I now use Zoom, which is still not blocked :)

Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint

There are some alternatives for these Microsoft office products.

1. Use these products on Office 365 on the web (if not blocked by IT)

2. Use LibreOffice which is a builtin Office suite for Ubuntu.

3. Use Google docs, sheets, and slides.

VPN

In most cases VPN clients are available for Ubuntu machines as well. For example Pulse VPN client is available.

If All Fails

Sometimes, nothing works, and you must use windows. For this keep another machine with windows, and use remmina RDP to connect to it from the Ubuntu.