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OS PLATFORMS
Swiss Army sticks a knife in American cloud apps with its own FOSS push
Switzerland's Federal Chancellery is preparing to offer a FOSS workplace suite to some 3,000 employees – but the Swiss Armed Forces are pushing ahead faster still.
European interest in digital sovereignty isn't limited to the European Union: the Swiss Federal Chancellery plans to offer selected government employees a FOSS alternative that will run alongside Microsoft 365. The chancellery is launching the program with an initial 3,000 staff, out of some 47,000 federal employees. The platform is expected to become available to about 3,000 selected employees from the end of 2027, with the first phase forecast to cost CHF 9 million (£8.2 million, $11.1 million). For comparison, Swiss Radio reported last year that the federal government had spent CHF 1.1 billion (£1 billion, $1.4 billion) on Microsoft licenses.
The program follows the BOSS Proof of Concept feasibility study, which began last year and tested browser-based FOSS tools with 172 users. The English version of the report says: "Functions examined included document editing, email, calendar, contacts, tasks, file storage, audio and video conferencing, chat, and identity and access management."
The study carefully spells out four limits to its scope:
It would not replace Microsoft 365
It would not have 1:1 functionality
It would not have full M365 compatibility
It would not be permanent infrastructure
It's important to make this stuff plain right at the start. Back in 2022, in a piece whose working title was You can't buy software, this vulture mentioned a member of one of his online communities who wanted to replace Microsoft software with free software – but demanded complete fidelity, including intact imports of all his Outlook files. This kind of exact and perfect match is basically impossible, and the four bullet points above strike us as a good effort at managing users' expectations.
The Chancellery concluded that the browser-based suite was suitable in principle for key standard tasks, although it also identified technical and operational limitations. The next phase will cover less than 10 percent of federal employees and is expected to take about 15 months. The plan is to use the openDesk suite from the German state-owned enterprise ZenDIS. This is the same collaboration suite that we reported Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was adopting in July, following neighboring Schleswig-Holstein in 2025.
The move is part of the Swiss government's Digital Switzerland Strategy 2026, announced in Bern at the end of 2025 – less than a month after its Federal Council's report on Swiss digital sovereignty. They also follow the 2024 introduction of the Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks – or EMBAG for short. The government has a fresh interest in open source – indeed, the Chancellery maintains an online catalog of its own open source tools.
Back in July, Heise reported in English that the Swiss Armed Forces were making similar moves. It cites a German-language report from Swiss publication Republik, Die Cyber-Spezialisten des Bundes kehren Microsoft den Rücken – The federal government's cyber specialists are turning their backs on Microsoft – which has more details. The military is moving faster: Republik says it aims to complete the migration by October 2026 – next month at the time of writing. Again, there is a local precedent – this time, from Austria. In September last year, representatives of the Austrian military presented a talk at the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest: Migration to LibreOffice in the Austrian Armed Forces (ÖBH). Last month, the ÖBH gave a long interview to the Document Foundation about how and why: part 1 and part 2. ®
English (US) ·