Switzerland pilots open-source swap for Microsoft 365 on 3,000 workstations

Switzerland’s Federal Chancellery is spending CHF 9 million to move 3,000 federal employees — roughly 7% of the workforce — off Microsoft 365 and onto openDesk, a German open-source collaboration suite, with completion targeted for the end of 2027. The pilot follows a feasibility study (“PoC BOSS”) in which 172 staff tested the platform; routine document work and email scored well, though large-scale video conferencing still lagged. During the pilot the open-source stack will run alongside Microsoft 365 rather than replacing it outright, and success could push the effort toward all 54,000 federal workstations.

The migration is driven by digital sovereignty concerns rather than cost alone: reliance on a single US vendor raises the risk of foreign data access under American cloud law, creates single-supplier operational fragility, and locks the government into rising proprietary licensing with little negotiating leverage. It builds on the 2024 EMBAG law, which requires federal agencies to publish government-developed software as open source by default, and a December 2025 Federal Council decision naming digital sovereignty a priority theme.

Switzerland’s military is moving faster — Cyber Command aims to replace Microsoft 365 with openDesk entirely by October 2026 to keep sensitive defense data out of foreign reach. Similar efforts are underway in France and Germany. Microsoft, meanwhile, is countering the sovereignty argument by investing over CHF 325 million in local AI and cloud infrastructure.