What’s of interest? Office EU - Europe’s Open-Source Productivity Suite
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Office EU is a complete cloud-based office suite (like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) that is 100% European-owned and runs entirely on European infrastructure.
Office EU is designed for organisations and individuals across Europe who refuse to trade convenience for privacy. Whether you’re a small business owner, part of a non-profit team, or a privacy-conscious individual, Office EU adapts to you.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
That is interesting. Obviously, while this appears to handle quantity, the the next question is a question of quality. And after that open? And then commercial or not-for-profit. I would love to hear from anyone who has used this.
As an alternative for the office suite component, we have been working with Collabora (https://www.collaboraonline.com/) who has been porting opensource LibreOffice to the cloud and getting sizable EU funds to make an viable alterntive to Google/Microsoft. And doing so with OpenSource technology that can run on EU or any other geolocated host.
This is the basis of the Forge platform in the LibreVerse that we built to faciliate long-form writing and Open Pedagogy at scale (https://forge.libretexts.org).
For what it’s worth, Delmar, the Office.eu site is displaying a system which is a combination of NextCloud and Collabora Office (both German open source/libre projects backed by companies – NextCloud was formerly known as OwnCloud), which together provide an excellent (I would say ‘drop-in’) replacement for Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps, including the messaging/audio/video conferencing functionality of MS Teams/Google Meet.
NextCloud also offers far more besides with its open source/libre ‘app’ ecosystem which offers substantially more integrations and further features. Note that Collabora (a German company) has been working on providing a browser-based collaborative ‘front-end’ for LibreOffice (which is a more mature version of stand alone Microsoft office whose codebase actually started before MS Office - it was originally started as StarOffice by German company, StarDivision, which was later acquired by Sun Microsystems because it was cheaper to buy the company than pay for MS Office for all their staff, and who then open sourced it as OpenOffice. Then when Oracle acquired Sun, it was forked by its libre dev community to create LibreOffice (while Oracle’s jealous control of OpenOffice saw it whither and effectively die) which is now an excellent desktop alternative to Microsoft Office, offering better support, in many cases, for Microsoft files than even Microsoft’s own Office (even ‘corrupt’ files that MS Office won’t open).
At the OER Foundation, we ran NextCloud + CollaboraOffice (we actually preferred an excellent competing libre productivity system OnlyOffice - we had the option of switching between them) for nearly a decade and were amazed how much user-focused quality and capability libre projects like these can achieve on a negligible fraction of the resources of mega corporate products like those from Microsoft and Google. And without all the bloat, surveillance, content slurping for LLM training, and mostly unwanted AI integration.
I think the EU’s entering a very interesting phase as US BigTech is increasingly smothering its golden geese with pervasive ensh*ttification.
Thank you for the clarification of the history of things. I had heard a bit about NextCloud in the Collabora discussions, but never followed the breadcrumbs to look it up. I now know a little bit more.
OnlyOffice is a false open source software (developed in Russia by the subsidiary of a military supplier), as the AGPL license has been modified and is not compatible with the Open Source Definition.
In addition, OnlyOffice defaults to the closed proprietary Microsoft document format (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) which today is the main lock in mechanism used by Microsoft. Open Education Resources, in order to be truly open, should use the Open Document Format (ODF) used as default document format by LibreOffice and Is true open derivatives.
Using the Microsoft document format means putting your contents in the hand of a company which can block the access to documents at any time by silently changing the proprietary format. This is what has happened to the ICC (International Criminal Court) when Microsoft has blocked all contents because the US president didn’t like the sentence against Israel’s prime minister.
Unfortunately, the difference between the two formats is not visible to users, and this is the reason why Microsoft was able to convince the majority of users that their document format - which has been approved by ISO but has never been implemented according to the description provided to ISO - is a good choice as a standard format.
I can provide the necessary evidence about the above. I have written several articles on the topic on LibreOffice project blog: https://blog.documentfoundation.org, but there are hundreds of articles by academics which I can provide.