The Federal Office is coming: openDesk version 1.0 from mid-October

The federal government-funded, open-source Microsoft 365 alternative openDesk will be launched with version 1.0 in mid-October. openDesk promises open source applications for digital collaboration under a uniform interface. This includes word processing, spreadsheets, chat and video conferencing tools, cloud storage, a project management module, a wiki as well as email, contact and calendar functions.

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With the project, the federal government will reduce the German authorities’ dependence on US providers such as Microsoft. Version 1.0 will then be officially presented at the Smart Country Convention conference, which will take place in Berlin from October 15th to 17th.

Enterprise version with self-hosting and SaaS

The individual components of the office and collaboration suite are open source components from Collabora, Element, Nextcloud, Nordeck, Open-Xchange, Univention, Open Project and XWiki. In addition to the community edition of openDesk, version 1.0 also includes an enterprise edition with two professional operating models: as a package for operation in your own data center (self-hosting) and as software-as-a-service (SaaS). . openDesk is intended to run completely as a web application; local installations are not required.

The IT service provider B1 Systems will take care of the support for the self-hosting variant, while the SaaS version comes from the German cloud provider StackIT. Both companies were awarded the contract last month by ZenDis, the company behind Opendesk (“Center for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration”).

Sovereign workplace instead of Microsoft

openDesk is the result of an initiative by the federal government and nine federal states. The group came together 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 limited company on behalf of the federal government.

The federal government will provide ZenDiS with around 10 million euros to further develop the suite this 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 from the public North German IT service provider Dataport, which, however, is not completely open source and is currently only available as Software-as-a-Service.

(axk)