The New European Office Suite is a Private, Open-Source Alternative
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Digital sovereignty in Europe is taking another step forward. Office.eu has officially launched in The Hague. This new cloud service is positioning itself as a fully European, opensourcebased alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. The service promises digital sovereignty, strict compliance with European Union (EU) law, and a familiar cloudoffice experience for organizations wary of US platforms.
The new service is operated entirely by European owners and runs solely on EU-based infrastructure and data centers. This design, the company argues, keeps customer data "under European jurisdiction" and insulated from foreign legal regimes, such as the US CLOUD Act. By tying its technical and corporate structure to European territory, the company is directly tapping into longrunning concerns among EU policymakers and public bodies about dependence on US cloud giants for everyday productivity tools.
In a statement, Maarten Roelfs, CEO of Office EU, made this position clear: "We have seen more and more how essential it is to become cloud-independent and to rely on software that is built around European values. For many years, Europe has relied on American software and, therefore, created a certain risk of dependency. We have also given away control over our own data. Office.eu proves that we now have a strong European alternative, with sovereignty, privacy, and transparency at its core."
Roelfs isn't trying to convince people to change. With the change in government in the US, many EU governments and agencies are dumping American-based cloud services as fast as they can. This movement includes France, which is dumping Microsoft Teams and Zoom, the Austrian military, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein,Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon. These governments and agencies are dropping Microsoft programs in favor of homegrown European alternatives.
Built primarily on the EU-based, open-source Nextcloud Hub, Office.eu bundles file storage and sharing, email, calendar, online document editing, and chat plus video calls into a single, browserbased platform. The service deliberately mimics the look and feel of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to ease migration.
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