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EU states looking for MS Teams/O365 alternatives
79 points by pkz on Aug 30, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 84 comments
A group of agencies in Sweden have set up a project to find cloud providers who can provide an alternative to MS Teams/O365 following the Schrems2 decision [1]. Similar work is ongoing in other EU countries. Will more US software providers find partners in the EU to run cloud services in a way that doesn't involve risk of handing over customer data under FISA 702? There is definitely a huge need for compliant cloud solutions in the EU.

[1]: https://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.754943/swedish-gov-teams-alternative




O365 is a big pain point for Swiss banks. It's tremendous work to even assess the situation and you have to try to get straight answers out of MS in regards to every last detail of every feature.

From the little knowledge I have about this, it might not even be enough for MS to guarantee that the no data leaves EU borders but simply the fact that MS is a US company could be enough for US courts to force them to exfiltrate data. Not sure if this is correct or if they already have a company structure in place that would prevent this.

As much as I would like to see more competition thanks to this, I think at the end MS will figure it out and they will remain the dominant force.


> MS is a US company could be enough for US courts to force them to exfiltrate data.

The CLOUD Act of 2018 was written and passed with the purpose of forcing US companies to hand over data to the US government - regardless of where the data is stored.


Jitsi?[0] It was european at one point. And online LibreOffice from Collabora?[1]

[0] https://jitsi.org

[1] https://www.collaboraoffice.com


Jitsi is a very good solution. Probably the best open source video conferencing solution out there.

A good example of it's use in EU is it's integration in online meeting platform for Latvian Parliament. It was quickly implemented once COVID-19 pandemic started. And Jitsi is a core part of it. https://www.saeima.lv/en/news/saeima-news/28986-the-latvian-...


Jitsi is already integrated in Element/Matrix, so Matrix/Element is a better solution to cover most needs such as chat management.


I have trouble seeing Element as a solution for anything, to be honest. My experience with it is that it’s slow, has cumbersome/confusing UX and is unreliable. I recently re-evaluated it and came to the same conclusion.

I want it to succeed, but the base line should be being better than Teams in those points and I see it far from it.


> My experience with it is that it’s slow

I'm guessing you created an account on the default Matrix.org homeserver? While hardware requirements have been steadily dropping for months now, the default seems to attract more than enough people to negate these advances. So while Matrix.org accounts and rooms may feel slow, I hope you'll be willing to give it another shot some day in the future. To that end, I would highly recommend setting up your own server (as the French and German government agencies have done), or even hopping on mine (email is on my profile) if you just want to test it for a day or two.

As far as the cumbersome UI/UX - you got me. While some people like it, many people seem to disagree. Over time, the myriad of clients will presumably get better, and hopefully the people not currently enamored with the UX can find one they like :)

Regarding reliability, you may have to expand on that. I've been using my Matrix server (and Telegram / Whatsapp bridges) to chat for months now, and have had messages come through faster for me than others in the same group chat!

All that said, maybe you just had a bad experience. I'd never try and say you didn't, but hopefully there was another explanation than just "Matrix is still nowhere close to ready".


You would think the EU would be more interested in supporting Collabora seeing as how it's home-grown. Then again you'd think they'd be supporting their own Linux distros as well - such as Suse which is German again. Why isn't Europe investing in and promoting Europe?


For MS teams, many other alternatives like Element.io exists.

For 365 that's a lot harder, mostly because nobody has come close to what Outlook and Exchange can do in large orgs. Word, Excel, PP are somewhat replaceable and 80% of ppl in those orgs would probably be ok with the alternatives. It is the 20% that uses more niche features that may or may not work as expected in competing products.


What is it that Outlook and Exchange can do? I'm surprised that it's this and not word/excel that would be the blocker. Open source seems well-established within the email ecosystem...


They do fully integrated enterprise commications:

* Mail (often with proprietary additions, also shared mailboxes)

* Calendar (appointments, mostly: plan with others’ free/busy times, invitations, invitation replies, integration with resource booking, …)

* Global Address Book

* Tasks (To-do list, can also be mailed)

I don’t know any non-proprietary solutions that integrate all this in a decently user-friendly way. Google certainly does, but then you might as well stay with Microsoft. It’s not just about the service capabilities either: The client (be it a web or a desktop application) has to be good as well.


At least it is able to move almost all my e-mails to spam folder (where they are deleted after a month), without any way to disable this "feature" except by slowly whitelisting senders.

Another great "feature" is that if you have accounts on two different organizations, it seems to be impossible to logon to the other account even after signing out from the first account, unless you use private mode on the browser.


> unless you use private mode on the browser.

Check out Multi-Account Containers if you're using Firefox. They solve this exact problem.


Mailbox/retention policies can be tweaked, as well as mail flow ones by your administrator. With that said, depending on the combination of other antimalware/antispam apps that your company uses and Microsoft being quite pushy about their antispam for some reason, even that may not be a perfect solution.


Modify your Firefox shortcut to:

firefox -ProfileManager or firefox.exe -ProfileManager

All your problems solved, and even others you didn't expect you could ;)


I am trying for years to replace Outlook - Exchange is no Problem- but everybody wants the Look and feeling of Outlook. If you have a viable alternative working on Linux, Mac and Windows, please tell me! I am using Evolution right now.


Try searching for Linagora. They have solutions that are open source and caters to this particular problem.


Isn’t Gmail widespread enough to be appreciated?


If your worry is violating Schrems 2 https://iapp.org/news/a/the-schrems-ii-decision-eu-us-data-t... why would you choose Gmail?


If your plan is to move away from O365 frying pan them jumping into Google's fire is definitely not the way to go.


Group Calendar and Email in a corporate setting with hundreds of people.

I guess gmail/google calendar can play in this space, but are there any open source options?


We're quite happy with what Linagora [1] offered a few years back. It's a French company so they work within EU framework of law. Their products are all open source, they only sell support services.

[1] : https://www.linagora.com/en/


Element/matrix having private homeserver hosting options + controls over federating are some of THE killer features IMO. Allows admins quite a lot of control.


In conjunction with recently announced subsidies and government spending to jumpstart the economy after Covid, I see this more as a strategy announcement, similar to the Chinese 2025 plan.

It'll be quite fruitless in the short term, because already nobody really likes Office 365. Everyone just uses it for lack of better options.

But in the long term, governments announcing their intent to purchase should be quite the incentive for startups to replicate the core Office365 functionality. Of course, that's not going to be feature compete, but AFAIK most people only use a tiny subset of what Word / Excel can do.


During my journey to break up with Google, I found Infomaniak is another option for EU countries.

https://www.infomaniak.com/en/kdrive/apps


Good luck getting 30+ years of experience in writing Office software (and then porting it to the cloud) with an EU startup.


Good luck getting 30+ years of experience in writing Office software out of office365. I feel like I am missing half the features every time I use it and given that I barely go beyond drawing a few boxes with lines connecting them when it comes to power point I think that says something about how limited the experience is.

Web versions of software still sometimes feel like an attempt to sell a fraction of the feature set from 1995 in a laggy, less polished interface as an improvement.


> Web versions of software still sometimes feel like an attempt to sell a fraction of the feature set from 1995 in a laggy, less polished interface as an improvement.

That, and using an order of magnitude more hardware resources and leaking memory everywhere until your computer runs out of RAM. I have yet to find a browser which, with JavaScript enabled, will let me use it for more than a few hours without filling my RAM.


If you've ever used the online Office365 then you know that Microsoft's experience in writing desktop office software didn't transfer to the cloud offering at all. (Online Office is horrible in every way and isn't even compatible with desktop Office.)

So I'm saying it should be doable, theoretically. Starting from scratch might be an opportunity here, not an impediment.


Can it be worse than offline MS Office? I've never used O365 and got initially acquainted with MS Office on some version of Winword before going deep on O'97, but whatever I use now feels full of limiting UI quirks that were tolerable twenty years ago but feel outrageously cumbersome looking at them from the present day. Combined with the sedimental layers of crustified superficial UI "reinventions" of several generations of product managers trying to leave their mark that eventually burden every Microsoft product. It's hardly surprising that fresh approaches like Google's offerings seem to eat MSOffice's lunch without even seriously trying.


We could simply pool a bunch of money together to invest in development of Jitsi and OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Especially the latter desperately need it.

The problem is, our politicians are either bought-off, digitally incompetent or irrelevant (sorry, Die PARTEI and Pirates, you're good but you're too small).


SoftMaker is a German company that has been developing and selling office software 30+ years.


yeah, good luck with all the help&documentation available, KB system, rich features, and least but not last - integration with all other services and components.

its wishful thinking or marketing to imagine that LibreOffice is anywhere near this... or Google Docs.

For trivial documents - fine - any processor can do some work. For serious work - MS Office and most likely the desktop version of the app. And after all how did suddenly all desktop apps become obsolete? Well, they are not.


I agree that LibreOffice is basically a non-starter in this competition, but I also think you are over-selling the MS support experience - most of the information online to help with Word/Excel is rudimentary garbage cluttering up the search space.

We need a set of stand-alone Office alternatives which are fully cross-platform (so, Electron), backwards compatible with Excel spreadsheets and also offering more advanced no-code functionality, and for the Word/PowerPoint equivalents something with the power of LaTeX but an easy to use WYSIWYG fall-back.

Is that really so much to ask?...


> Is that really so much to ask?...

Yes. You cited requirements that to be satisfied together require a huge effort. You want something that can "just work" and is also cross-platform, power user friendly (LaTeX), and should be snappy to be able to gain traction. Not to mention that you have to compete with the ecosystem lockin of Office-Teams-Onedrive-Sharepoint-Azure.

I frankly see no way a competitive alternative could appear without a billion dollar budget backing it.


(I know, I was being sarcastic. Wondered if the ... would be semantically similar enough to /s to convey that, but clearly not.)


You may find it helpful to read up on Poe's law [0].

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law


> And after all how did suddenly all desktop apps become obsolete? Well, they are not.

Which is one reason we don't need Microsoft's Office365 offer at all? I mean, especially in the case of big governments/orgs where they operate an entire fleet of machines, providing good desktop software would be a much better experience than crappy webapps.

Unless of course the goal is real-time collaboration, in which case that's an entirely different use-case and i have no idea how google/microsoft tools fare in this space (but Hedgedoc/Cryptpad are solid).


IMHO your statement holds good ground. perhaps not so many people need web version. still - OFfice365 is about integration with Azure, not only the web client, which... eventually will be replaced from its current from with something that builds on top of wasm/canvas (bet 5$ on it).

The real-time collaboration is vastly overrated mostly, and thanks to Google's marketing. How many times have anyone had to do a real-time edit of document. How many times it was crucial for the process. And how is this better than git push/pulls?

Well, there are some 5% of all cases where real-time collaboration on a document is good to have, but 95% of all times is reasonably OK to share a screen and have few people stand right by the side of s.o. performing actions.


You are 100% +1 right with scope evaluation !

Still, as all -1 Earth goverments was doing nothing in last 40 years, it is now time to start ! Let it take 20 - 30 years - so what ?

Ok, -2 - China tried to create Windows clone from scratch and failed. Instead MS wrote them social-spying-for-credit system...

Why I say it's govs work and not some company or "startup" LOL ? Becouse of scope or more precise: users expectations.

In that last 40 years just Sun tried to do something sensible and we own them a lot.

So plan should be:

- build on package installable on premise

- many implementations - even few per nations - will not be a mistake. We have open formats in that century...

- client-server model, with server running on host or somewhere on LAN / VPN

- security included from day one, not "to be added later"

- drop http and browsers and rebuild this part, too much bullshit accumulated. After all it's just protocol stack. And we have 30 years long timeframe for it ! Browsers are too stagnated.

- do not include in planning stage peoples involved in "cookie consent" massacre... Looks like listening to American corporations ends like this. Tell them what to do and they will possibly do the best.

- assign funds NOW for next 50 years of incremental development

- make own CPUs, each nation / big company own. And build C compiler for that CPU. Make sure Linux or Minix work on it

Yes, somehow Americans are best with building many things but instantly as they got total control they mess it up. And then keep messing it more !

So let build things, make new good standards and then let Americans join ! :)


Because the usual office clerk needs office software that runs in the cloud? I don't think so. It is completely sensible to use open source alternatives.

China created their own government Linux distribution. Every country should do exactly that.

They should adapt the sensible stuff, the innovation from China. Not the totalitarian crap like mass surveillance. But that is a feature set I expect to see in MS products in the future. This is an automatism for the company by now.


https://www.onlyoffice.com/


Good luck finding competent developers and paying them European salaries.

Most of these companies hire mediocre developers in small numbers because of budget constraints and then work on their product on borrowed time until the EU seed money runs out.


> Good luck finding competent developers and paying them European salaries.

I can assure you some of the brightest people i know are paid a misery in your standards, first of which researchers working for public universities. Free software "consulting" companies like Collabora are also filled with brilliant people.

On the other hand, i don't think i know a single person that gets paid high salary (> 2000-3000€/mo) that does anything useful for society at large or has an interesting skillset. Those are usually managers or Chief Whatever Officers, and i believe the whole society would fare much better without them.

Trying to equate skill/usefulness with salary is a doomed enterprise. You'd be surprised with the knowledge and skills of some janitors cleaning your office, if you ever talk to them.


I would extend this by saying that most of the people in the US earning mid 6 figures as developers are doing even less good for society than those managers. The market set those salaries high because the negligible marginal cost of reproduction in the software industry is a lure for capital, not because it produces things we actually need.


Are you suggesting that European developers are not competent? Because most of us work for European salaries.


I am saying, not suggesting, that developers who accept to work for a much lower salary will naturally be, in average, less competent than those who know their worth.


That's a stupid argument. EU-based developers usually get paid EU-level salaries ( so higher than the median EU salaries). Some work at American companies' EU-based offices, for slightly better salaries ( sometimes), but things remain in the same ballpark.

Not everyone desires to move to the US to get a Silicon Valley-level salary and sacrifice their Quality of Life for it.


What's wrong with getting paid more while being able to live in a place with large homes with large yards and wide road ways...

Electricians in the US easily make over $70k early on, and over $100k with in a few years. And that isn't even the best paying trade job.

An experienced Programmer easily can get a job making 120k+, and that isn't even in the valley.

That being said, I wouldn't want to move here either. You get paid more, the homes are nicer and more private, and you fit a big SUV down any road. But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids. Along with that you have idiots that think trump was the second coming of jesus. And do nothing more than cry about thing that will only hurt them in the long run.


> Electricians in the US easily make over $70k early on, and over $100k with in a few years.

The median pay for electricians in the US is $56,900; the cutoff for the top 10% is under $100K [0], which is quite inconsistent with them “easily” making $70K early on and $100K within a few years.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/mobile/e...


Maybe a few years ago, and that number most likely factors in appetences. Not strictly journeymen.

Any Journeymen not taking home north of $65k should be looking for another job, as their employer is screwing them over. There simply isn't enough of them and employers will gladly pay for someone experienced to join their work force. Even with the recent massive pay increases it is hard to keep people from going somewhere else for even higher pay.

A website like that doesn't really keep up with what is really happening in a field like that. $100K/year working 50-60hours a week is not uncommon.


> That being said, I wouldn't want to move here either. You get paid more, the homes are nicer and more private, and you fit a big SUV down any road.

Which is a thoroughly unsustainable way of living. I like walking and biking, and I wouldn't want to sacrifice them and the practicality of having everything within a walking/biking/public transit distance for more house and yard maintenance.

> But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids.

And takes a mental toll having to worry about that kind of thing. I don't want to be afraid to go to the doctor.


Because everyone who "knows their worth" is willing to endure a poor work-life, subpar healthcare, inferior education for their children, volatile social climate, practically non-existent social protection and crazy wildfires in exchange for a higher salary, right?


Well I can say most of that is hit or miss, and some just downright wrong. Crazy Wildfires is the only correct issue here, lol.

The actual Hospitals and Doctors in America have always been hands down better. Its only if you can afford it. Really any top tier Silicon Valley job is going to come with pretty good heath insurance. The Subpar Healthcare is more or less a poor person problem. Nothing like destroying net worth like having to go to the doctor with sub par insurance. Getting 3-6K+ in bills over a few nonsense visits.

Like I said before I wouldn't move to America either. But to think the EU isn't a$$ Backwards in many ways would be an understatement. I lived in the UK for 3 years, and like most of Europe school system is a hit or miss depending on location. Private Schooling is not uncommon in America for that reason.

This in part is why Americans in higher level careers (family's with income of 120K+) tend to retire with more money in their retirement accounts than their EU brothers. Nearly all my Fellow successful 30yo's had over 50K in their 401k when they turned 30. The ones that didn't are ones that will most likely always jump around to different entry level jobs.


It's a sad life if money is the only motivator.


IDK about you, but money is a huge motivator.

Taking advantage of money is exactly what you want to do. Money will make you more money. So not having money working for you only works to keep you down. The more money you have working for you, the more it makes in a given part of time. Want to create generational wealth, you'll need to make as much $$ as you possibly can and teach your kids how to keep growing their chunk after you pass.

As someone that grew up in a lower middle class home where extra cash just didn't exist. My dedication in life is to make my children set in life. I was lucky enough to find a career path to allow for such entitlement. No it is not a sad life, its only sad if said money is purely for self indulgement.


Notice I wrote ONLY. Of course it's a huge motivation, but would I move to a country or city I hate for x dollars? Would I work in a company that's making chemical weapons that work only on kids? Would I work for Facebook?

No I wouldn't and there are dozens of (less comical) examples where I draw the line.


Nobody really needs the feature set of MS Office.


True, except everyone needs a different set of their own 10% features.


Obviously, but they're targeting everyone with a huge feature set


They can use a very good Danish/Swedish alternative: Skype. Or maybe not, because it was sold to an American company.


Microsoft has also ruined that. Whatsmore Teams (at least on Linux) appears to be Skype under-the-hood with just a different UI. Even the name of the audio device for Teams remains unchanged.


Most of the developers have been and still are in Estonia. It would be easier to enforce regulations there technically.


Skype was Estonian.


Skype had it's main dev office in Estonia and that was where most of the development work was done, but it was never an Estonian company.


Very interestingly, most comments seem to focus on trying to propose you a "magic" product. The problem you are trying to solve is not a technology but a human issue: most organizations don't have the resources anymore to handle the technical complexity required to operate an integrated collaboration platform that is fully interoperable both within the organization and outside.

The shortest answer is that Microsoft solved this problem by hiring lots of people and making it possible (Google, too, but that keeps you with the same compliance issue).

The first problem EU States need to solve is human resources. Then they will be able to discuss possible solutions.

Starting the discussion on how to replace Microsoft by looking for products is basically running into a 100% failure trajectory.

My 2 cents.


Corollary to my comment in relation with the swiss banks example in another thread: when all actors face the same problem, it's not a problem.


Matrix? That's already widely available, with E2E, and can be self-hosted too.


That is one of the products they are considering (like the French government did). But it needs more functionality than team chat to be viable.


I wish they considered ONLYOFFICE. Nice online document and sheet editor, company is based in Latvia, an EU and Eurozone member. And since it's AGPL, any govt can hire a team and fork it, to tailor it to their liking.


I think OnlyOffice is one of the candidates being considered. But it needs more tools around it (e.g. Nextcloud for files and tasks, videoconferencing etc).

If the OnlyOffice developers made a giant leap to broaden their product they would likely attract a lot of customers in the EU right now.


Depending on what they are seeking, Zoho [1] might be a good choice (has most pieces of the office/apps/IT suite).

I've also heard that Zoho has been having very good traction in Europe, especially among users looking to avoid the MS/Goog duopoly and stay on the right side of data sovereignty requirements.

[1] https://www.zoho.com/


But isn't Zoho Corp an Indian / US company? If so the customer needs to do an assessment of India as a third country and what laws they have that may impact GDPR compliance. Sounds difficult.


This is a fairly good idea. I think funding OS Office solutions would be feasible. It would be the cheapest thing any government ever did when it approached software.

And no, the average clerk can just a well use Word 95 and Libre Office is often just as feature rich as the MS alternative. The largest difference is Excel I believe. Well, then use Excel, but the rest isn't needed for anything.


Word Excel is a small part of O365.

They clearly are talking about Teams, Sharepoint, Onedrive, and Outlook.

O365 is by far the best option out there, especially compared to others in the same price range. Like Google's Gsuit which for the money is a second rate product. Only reason why GSuite is even used for many is ease of use. MS's 365 suite requires an experienced IT wizard to setup correctly. With about a dozen Admin consoles to shift through, especially with any Azure services used.

A real O365 alternative would be bad news for MS, and would require a massive amount of cash. It took over a decade to get 365 where it is now. This isn't something you can build overnight.


My understanding is that the problem isn't Office itself, but the cloud and online collaboration features. So saying "just use Word95 or Open Office" is in no way a solution.


I can understand teams, but I always think about "collaboration" as a waste of time in day to day business. People happily share on network drives and if you really need SharePoint, take a look at Nextcloud.

Domain controlling is perhaps something not easily replaced, but the rest is just fluff in my opinion. Teams might be the most useful app of all the bunch.

Seeing other cursors in a Word document was a fun at first, now it only induces endless rage and while neat, it certainly isn't a requirement.


To implement Nextcloud to the same level as Sharepoint, big money would need to be spent. Remember this data can never be lost, and needs little to no downtime. Building your own cloud service is no cheap and easy option. Epically when its a bank. Even a custom solution built on opensource tech was used, they would be responsible to keep it updated. That in itself is a massive task.

There is a reason why Azure and AWS based cloud systems are pretty much a standard. There isn't a solid alt.

O365 Exchange keep you free from worrying about keeping your server up to date. O365 Teams allows for not only communication but collaboration. Teams integrates with SharePoint allowing for project sites. O365 Sharepoint & Onedrive allow for extremely flexible data storage and data shares. With all the permission options you'd ever need. You can move your AD Login's user folder to use your personal Onedrive account, a highly effective tool.

There just isn't good options to replace O365. Google's GSuite is a crappy alt for Admins that couldn't figure out 365's complex admin consoles.


The interesting thing is, that in Germany Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom used to have a set up, where you could buy O365 hosted by Telekom, without Microsoft (as a US company) having access to the data if they are asked for it, via the Cloud Act.

But as they had many integration problems, they stopped offering this service in 2018[1] (German).

I think looking at GDPR and Schrems2 requirements, this would have been a viable model.

[1]: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Auslaufmodell-Micros...


I believe it will come back. France is working on Bleu [1] which looks very similar to what Germany and Microsoft tried back then. In the mean time I think startups like Basecamp [2] that can provide a compliant alternative right now would get quite a lot of customers. One way of doing it is partnering with a European company to provide the same service out of reach to the US government.

[1]: https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/05/27/223...

[2]: https://basecamp.com/


Friend OS is a great open source platform, with shared storage, document collaboration and video conferencing.

https://friendsky.cloud/


One of my endless frustrations is feeling like O365 is the only game in town.

I imagine it is a fruitless process in the short term


This is the reason I'm, and a group of people develop deployment methods for NEXTCLOUD.

We want to be able to offer PRIVATE solution that will be able to deliver both secure and private cloud infrastructure at scale to organizations that can't affort placing their data in the hands of neither Donald Trump or Xi Jinping.

https://charmhub.io/nextcloud


Nextcloud is trying to be that replacement. I hope they succeed.




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