Switzerland Tests Life Beyond Microsoft 365

Headlines this month claimed “Switzerland ditches Windows.” The reality is more modest but still significant: the Swiss federal government has launched a funded pilot to move a slice of its workforce off Microsoft 365 and onto open-source alternatives. It’s not a switch — yet. But it’s a real program, with real money, a real timeline, and a real reason behind it: reducing dependence on foreign-controlled cloud software.

What Switzerland Is Actually Testing

On September 2, 2026, Switzerland’s Federal Chancellery published results from a feasibility study called PoC BOSS (“Büroautomation mit Open-Source-Software”). 172 employees across several departments spent months testing whether a browser-based, open-source workplace could replace core Microsoft 365 functions: email, calendar, documents, file storage, chat, and video calls. The verdict was a qualified yes — document editing, file storage, and collaboration scored well; large-scale video conferencing still struggled.

The suite behind the test is openDesk, a German-built, publicly-owned open-source platform. Under the hood it bundles Collabora Online for documents, Open-Xchange for email and calendar, Nextcloud for file storage, OpenProject for project management, XWiki for internal knowledge bases, Jitsi (branded Nordesk) for video calls, Element for chat, and Univention for identity and access management — all pieces PSP readers will recognize as open-source tools with consumer equivalents, not just government toys.

Based on these results, the Chancellery is now rolling openDesk out to around 3,000 of the federal government’s 54,000 workstations by the end of 2027, at an estimated cost of CHF 9 million. It will run alongside Microsoft 365, not replace it outright — a cautious first phase rather than a full migration. The legal groundwork was already in place: a 2024 law called EMBAG requires federal software to be published as open source wherever possible, under a “public money, public code” principle.

Germany and Austria Are Already Moving

Switzerland isn’t pioneering here — it’s catching up. openDesk itself comes from Germany’s ZenDiS, a state-owned body set up specifically to reduce public-sector reliance on Microsoft. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is the furthest along in Europe: nearly 80% of its workstations have already moved to LibreOffice, after shifting roughly 44,000 mailboxes to open-source email. Austria has taken a different route — its armed forces completed the removal of Microsoft Office from all 16,000 military computers back in September 2025, citing concerns about US surveillance laws reaching Austrian defense data, with a further 30,000 civilian government computers earmarked for the same shift.

Why Sovereignty Matters Beyond Governments

The driving logic across all three countries is the same: US laws like the CLOUD Act and FISA can, in principle, compel American companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world — including in EU or Swiss data centers. Add rising licensing costs and the operational risk of depending on a single foreign vendor for critical infrastructure, and “digital sovereignty” stops sounding abstract and starts sounding like basic risk management.

That logic doesn’t only apply to governments. The same tools these countries are testing at scale — Nextcloud for storage, Collabora or LibreOffice for documents, Element for chat — are available to anyone today, running on infrastructure you or a trusted provider actually control. Governments moving cautiously and slowly toward these tools is, if anything, a signal that they’re mature enough for individuals to adopt faster.

Switzerland’s pilot won’t replace Microsoft 365 in 2026, or even in 2027. But it adds a third country to a growing European pattern, and it puts real numbers — users, costs, timelines — behind what had mostly been political rhetoric about sovereignty. Worth watching: whether the October 2026 Swiss military deadline holds, and whether the 3,000-user pilot expands once its results are in.

Photo: Christian Wasserfallen via Pexels