It has been tried over the years. The question really is how much the employees understand and care about digital sovereignty. If they keep complaining because they have to learn new tools, they will eventually go back to Microsoft...

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558635

Bravo to them.

Hopefully some of the savings make it to foundations, hiring of engineers, and other ways of funding improvements!

Note a German state (a not very large one of the 16 federal states), not the German state

I am really curious as Microsoft deprecates some of their older proprietary protocols in favor of standards, if there will be a point Exchange can be substituted without Outlook users noticing the difference. Getting people to leave Office products is super hard, whereas the server is something most people do not know they are using.

(Obviously 365 bundles are designed to avoid this. But for a la carte licenses, you can choose one without the other.)

It's not an isolated event, German states are pretty serious about this.

They are funding openDesk [1], a fully open source office and collaboration suite aiming to replace solution likes Google Drive and Office 365 with sovereign solutions. Open-Xchange is one component of this suite.

They are building this by taking existing software and packaging it in a consistent turn-key solution. To do this, they are paying the small European open source companies that build this existing software, to make it embeddable and accessible, and they fund specific features as well.

They make sure the whole thing remains strictly open source, and they audit open source license compatibility.

The approach feels solid and long term for once. It's not money that goes to your sexy local startup that builds proprietary software and will be bought by a big company a couple of years after.

[1] https://opendesk.eu/

Dropping MS Exchange is only sane choice.

But :) Look like replacement is Mozilla product :> j/k a bit :)

Bigger problem is that replacement is fat codebase project. Same with Libreoffice. And that make it short term solution.

Simple software is the way.