Third week under second Covid-19 lock-down in Austria (6th Dec. 2020)

Three weeks of hard lock-down have passed and we are about to switch back to lock-down “light”. Stores will re-open on Monday 7th, but hotels, restaurants, bars and ski lifts remain closed. The curfew will be reduced from all-day to 18:00 – 06:00. Home-office has never been mandatory but recommended and will be recommended in the future.

Data shows that both lock-down “light” and “hard” lock-down were successful and infection rate is going down to high but stable niveau. Question is how will Christmas and New Year impact? We are eagerly watching the data from US and how Thanksgiving impacted the number of infections.

Austria is staring voluntary free mass-testing. The army is organizing hundreds of testing sites all over the country. Anti-Gen quick tests are used to identify infectious people. These test have a very low false-negative rate. In case someone is identified as positive, a PCR test is done. Hopefully many non-symptomatic infections people can be found and isolated before Christmas to avoid a third wave and a third lock-down in January. While the registration was a digital disaster the testing itself was easy. Make an appointment and fill out a form. Bring the form and an ID card to the test site. If you have no printer at home it will be printed for you. Get tested and leave the test site. The result is sent to your mobile phone after aprox. 15 minutes.

It’s all over now, baby blue

Microsoft-Hosted Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management Tier1 environments are gone. If you need a development or build environment you have to host it at your own costs in an Azure subscription. Typically partners will create an Azure Subscription for the customer and deploy the Tier1 environments there. Depending on the size (recommended ist D12v2) and Auto-Shutdown strategy the costs will be somewhat equal to the former Tier1 Addons.

During the first lock-down in spring Azure reached its capacity limit in Europe. Even Netflix and YouTube reduced the streaming quality to HD and lower. Microsoft shut of Teams functionality like seaing someone typing in the chat window and video conferences. In spring we were advised to deploy Tier2 environments in other regions than Europe. Thankfully this time we did not experience such capacity limits although many partners deployed many virtual machines for their customers in November.

IT-Disaster Austria Part 1 – The empty Online Shop

This week was an IT disgrace for the Austrian government. Last week was Black-Friday week and Cyber Monday at Amazon. In order to strengthen Austrian companies the Ministry for Digital and Economic affairs together with the Austria Commerce Chamber decided invest 700.000€ to develop and launch an Austrian Online Shop. This week the “Kaufhaus Österreich” / “Store Austria” was launched and failed immediately. Because it is nothing more than a link list with a not functional search. The search does not index the products from the vendors but only their company name and description. For Example, if you search for a mouse no results are returned because no registered vendor has “mouse” in their company name 🤣

IT-Disaster Austria Part 2 – COVID-19 mass-test registration

Austria will conduct free corona mass tests in December. To organize these tests an online registration page. There you have to provide name, social security number, Email or phone number. After the registration a mail is sent with a link to make an appointment in a local test center. The registration site was announced in the media but the registration site failed permanently with an unexpected error. People report that 5 or more try were required to get registered.

But the “unexpected server error” on submit was not the only problem. The Austrian news paper Der Standard reported a list of problems:

• The site went offline only few hours after launch because of an DDOS attack
• People could not book an appointment in their home district
• Someone managed to book so many appointments that a test site was exclusively blocked
• Some Email addresses were deleted
• The website had no imprint

Much more problematic is a huge data leak. More and more people report that they get personal data from other people. For example, on Wednesday a teacher from Carinthia reported that he got an appointment for another person from Vienna.