Teachers at public schools and universities will be obliged to communicate with parents, schoolchildren and students only through Russian messengers, mail and video services. The restriction will take effect in February 2022. All civil servants will also have to switch to domestic software, Kommersant reported. The authorities were pushed to this by the pandemic, as well as problems with the purchase of programs from Microsoft. Experts consider the initiative to be difficult to implement.
By December 2021, the Ministry of Digital Industry will prepare a regulatory framework for the transfer of officials and employees of budgetary organizations to the state platform for “support of working communications – mail, instant messengers, video-conference services,” said Kommersant. This is stated in the action plan of the program “Creation of additional conditions for the development of the information technology industry.”
According to the document, by February 2022, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Education will develop recommendations according to which teachers of schools and universities will have to communicate at work only using Russian services.
The office of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, who is in charge of communications, said that the initiative had already been approved by the government commission on digital development. The concept of the state platform involves the development of services for the operational exchange of data between departments, including during remote work. These are e-mail, instant messengers, audio and video conferencing services, electronic document management and a number of other digital services developed in Russia. Chernyshenko's staff noted that they are talking about existing software solutions, but did not specify the names of the products.
The Ministry of Education said that, together with the Ministry of Digital Science, they are preparing approaches to the use of domestic software, adding that Russian software is already being used in the field of education.
IVA Technologies CEO Stanislav Iodkovsky told the publication that even at the state level, foreign platforms are often used. These are free or discontinued solutions “with incomprehensible support”, as well as foreign cloud services, although there are competitive analogs among domestic systems, the expert noted.
The co-owner of Lanit-Terkom, Vladimir Ufnarovsky, called the initiative useful, but difficult to implement, since the system will be difficult to scale to large and multi-level institutions with a large number of participants.
For the first time, officials seriously thought about transferring universities and government agencies to domestic software at the end of 2020, when Microsoft refused to supply office suites to M. N.E.Bauman.
In April 2021, Secret reported that the American Zoom Video Communications, which developed the most popular online conference service in Russia, prohibited distributors from selling it to Russian state-owned companies. Then the Ministry of Digital Science clarified that Russia has at least five domestic video communication systems capable of becoming an alternative to Zoom, including Mail.ru Video Calls, Telemost from Yandex, Sbermitap from Sber.
In July it became known that Russian banks had agreed on a gradual transition to domestic software. And the government decided to increase the indices of independence of the domestic industry from imported software in the next three years.
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