Editor's take: Switzerland is joining a growing list of European countries that no longer want to do business with Microsoft and other US IT giants. The federal government has already begun ditching Microsoft's productivity tools in favor of open-source alternatives, and the country's military authorities are moving even faster with the transition.
Federal authorities of the Swiss Confederation recently launched a pilot program to replace Microsoft 365 tools with open-source alternatives. The Federal Chancellery's plan calls for investing 9 million Swiss francs (more than $11 million) to replace Redmond's productivity software with the openDesk suite on 3,000 machines, but it could eventually expand to a significantly larger number of workstations used by federal employees.
The pilot launched earlier this month, when authorities in Bern shared the results of a proof-of-concept program called "PoC BOSS." The program was designed to test the switch from Microsoft software with 172 federal employees, who used openDesk in place of Outlook, Teams, and other tools included in the Microsoft 365 offering.
openDesk was designed by the German Centre for Digital Sovereignty to provide a customizable office and collaboration suite focused on digital sovereignty and security. The Microsoft 365 brand now includes Windows enterprise licensing and additional management tools, but the Swiss plan will reportedly focus only on the platform's productivity tools for the time being.
The Swiss Federal Council deemed the results of the PoC BOSS pilot a success. Employees were able to comfortably perform traditional office tasks such as document processing and email, while "large-scale" video conferencing was still affected by some technical limitations compared with Microsoft Teams.
In any case, the Swiss government has decided to go ahead with its switch-off plan. By the end of 2027, 3,000 federal workstations should be completely free of Microsoft Office tools thanks to openDesk's custom productivity solutions. The plan will affect just 7% of the federal workforce, but Switzerland's entire fleet of 54,000 computers could eventually follow suit.
Switzerland's push for digital sovereignty has been underway for a while. In 2024, Bern enacted the EMBAG law to push public authorities toward open-source software solutions. And while civilian agencies are still working with pilot programs, the country's military is moving much faster to replace Microsoft software with FOSS tools.
At this point, Switzerland's Cyber Command should complete its migration from Microsoft 365 to openDesk by October 2026. According to Bern University professor Matthias Stürmer, overreliance on Microsoft products is detrimental to data protection efforts. Foreign governments, including the US, could potentially force Redmond to provide access to Swiss citizens' files. Meanwhile, licensing fees and subscription costs continue to see massive price increases every year.
Replacing Microsoft 365 with open-source alternatives might be the right approach to solving the sovereignty problem, but plans could eventually change. Replacing traditional software tools on aging IT systems is no easy "plug-and-play" task, as some users have remarked. The German city of Munich even tried to move from Windows to Linux in 2004, but eventually returned to the old operating system in 2017.