The Federal Office: openDesk leads out of Microsoft dependency
With proven open source components, the federal government-funded suite openDesk guides management out of Microsoft dependency.
Financed by the Federal Government, it has been in operation since October 2024. OpenDesk promises open source applications for digital collaboration under a unified interface. This includes word processing, spreadsheet, chat and video conferencing tools, cloud storage, a project management module, a wiki, and email, contact, and calendar features.
With the project, the federal government wants to reduce the dependence of the German authorities on US providers such as Microsoft.
- Enterprise version with self-hosting and SaaS
The individual components of the Office and Collaboration Suite are open source components of Collabora, Element, Nextcloud, Nordeck, Open-Xchange, Univention, Open Project and XWiki. In addition to the community edition of openDesk, version 1.0 is also an enterprise edition with two professional operating models: as a package for operation in your own data center (self-hosting) and as a software-as-a-service (SaaS). openDesk is to be run entirely as a Kubernetes-based cloud application, local installations are not required.
The IT service provider B1 Systems is to take care of the support of the self-hosting variant, the SaaS version comes from the German cloud provider StackIT. Last month, both companies were awarded the contract by ZenDis, which is behind Opendesk ("Centre for Digital Sovereignty of
Public Administration").
- A confident workplace instead of Microsoft
OpenDesk is based on an initiative by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and nine federal states. They joined forces in November 2021 to reduce the public sector's dependence on US software under the then project name "Sovereign Workplace". ZenDiS, founded in 2022, coordinates the development of openDesk as a public GmbH on behalf of the Federal Government.
The Federal Government intends to provide ZenDiS with around 10 million euros for the further development of the suite in the current year. In previous years, the federal government has already invested around 35 million euros in the development of openDesk. The Microsoft 365 alternative also competes with the technically closely related Phoenix suite of the public North German IT service provider Dataport, which, however, is not completely open source and is currently only available as a software-as-a-service.
(Source: heise.de/news/Microsoft-365-Al…)