Switzerland edges away from Microsoft with OpenDesk trial

The Swiss government is running a trial of OpenDesk as part of efforts to reduce reliance on Microsoft software.

OpenDesk will be trialled for a small tranche of workers who focus on business critical functions. The move comes amid wider digital sovereignty efforts across Europe.

France, for example, has started to shift away from US software for government purposes while one German state has switched four out of five administration computers away from Microsoft.

The Swiss government said it plans to shift office computing to open source software, following a feasibility study that suggested the move should be possible.

With OpenDesk, the aim is to switch 3,000 government employees by the end of next year for core office functions, effectively a trial to see if shifting away from Microsoft is sensible and to estimate the cost of a large-scale implementation.

These core functions include email, calendar, documents, presentations, video conferencing, and telephony. The standalone solution will operate alongside Microsoft 365, targeting employees who are responsible for critical business processes.

That's because the aim is to not only strengthen the digital sovereignty of the federal administration, according to a translated press release, though that is a "central theme" of the government's digital strategy.

Beyond that, Swiss authorities hope to boost crisis resilience, ensuring the government can continue operating even if Microsoft goes down.

The idea of digital sovereignty as a means to boost resilience gained credence following the US temporarily banning exports of key Anthropic models earlier this year, as well as the massive Crowdstrike outage in 2024.

In the UK, authorities have warned about the impact of phishing attacks on food supply following outages at major retailers last year.

Challenging proposition

The initial solution tested in the feasibility study was found sufficient to maintain standard core processes and could prove useful in an emergency such as a Microsoft Office 365 outage, the government noted.

However, the feasibility study also spotted limitations, in particular around video conferencing, saying that significant adaptations and security work would be required.

Indeed, the many apps tied to Microsoft's architecture present a significant challenge to shifting the entire federal government to open source alternatives, so a wider shift depends on the results of the trial.

But the Swiss government has partnered with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which has shifted much of its workstations to OpenDesk. The 3,000 workstations make up about 7% of the Swiss federal administration's employees.

What is OpenDesk?

OpenDesk is owned by the German Center for Digital Sovereignty, and offers workspace tools via a web browser, including documents, email, project management and identity management.

The government stressed the point of the study was not to replace Microsoft 365, nor does the OpenDesk platform need to replicate or integrate with all of the Microsoft 365 features.

The shift is long awaited: the feasibility report was finished last year, and reports from April suggested the government had decided to slowly reduce its dependence on Microsoft.

This move was, at least in part, driven by an incident in which the foreign affairs department stored classified documents on a Microsoft Cloud, meaning American authorities could potentially view the information.

In July, the Swiss Armed Forces said it would replace Microsoft Office 365 with OpenDesk by this October for its cybersecurity workers.

Over the last two years, Microsoft has worked to reassure governments in Europe that data is safe, pointing to locally stored private cloud as an option as well as European data centers that keep data away from the US via its EU Data Boundary — and the tech giant has invested significantly in Swiss data centers, too.

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