The European Commission Is Testing an Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Teams
10 69The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams.
Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission's size, it said. The Matrix-based solution could also eventually connect the Commission to other EU bodies like the Parliament.
10 comments
Finally, it is happening (Score: 5, Insightful)
by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @09:06PM (#65971692)
The move away from MS crap. Not for the reason I expected, but still.
The fatal mistake that Microsoft made was disable the email of the chief prosecutor at the International Court of Law. At that point, it became blatantly obvious and impossible to ignore that MS will do whatever the US administration wants to its international (and probably national) customers. The EU administration observed this event very carefully and drew its conclusions. Obviously, this will be a process over the next 5-10 years or so, but MS is cooked.
Re: Finally, it is happening (Score: 5, Insightful)
by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @09:31PM (#65971714)
What did it take to destroy Microsoft?
Corpocracy + fascism + consistently bad US foreign policy.
Sort of a perfect storm that turns what probably seemed like a sweet deal for the big tech companies into a nightmare scenario of break up. I bet they wish they still had Biden and the Dems in power, that let corporate interests run much of the government as long as they had diversity policies.
Can they? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Friday February 06, 2026 @03:34AM (#65972038)
Can the EU actually pull this off? There are some tools that MS has, which nobody else has:
1: AD/Entra. Maybe in the past, we had directory services and policy object servers that could scale up and out, but right now, AFAIK (and please correct me) AD/Entra are the only game in town if you have millions of users and need to handle AAA (authentication, authorization, auditing), of users, machines, and other objects, with GPOs and other policies attached. Yes, there is FreeIPA/IdM, and it works well, with replication, performance, and security. I'd assert it has a smaller attack profile than AD. However, it doesn't scale as well as AD can. AD can figure out how to replicate itself, and handle all kinds of oddball conditions.
Note, this can't be a cloud service. Ideally, authentication should either be on-prem, or at least hybrid, so even without network connectivity, people can log into their machines and do offline work, even if caching isn't doable.
2: A unified file sharing protocol. NFS v3 doesn't cut it for users. NFS v4 takes a well tuned environment to work. S3 is awesome for objects, but definitely not something you want to use as a VM storage backend. We need to have a protocol that allows for file sharing with the robustness of S3, but have additional commands for block I/O, so that can be as fast as possible. This would allow for things like versioning, object immutability, maybe even tiers of compression and encryption. However, as it stands now, SMB/CIFS is king, with nothing really dethroning it.
3: Something to replace Outlook/Exchange. A standardized mail, calendaring suite that has all the C-level features needed. This can be hard, as there are a lot of systems out there (Google WorkSpace, Zimbra, Zoho)... but feature-wise and usability-wise, MS comes out ahead, if only because people are familiar with it, and it does well enough.
4: SharePoint. Don't laugh, but SharePoint and Confluence are unique programs. There are other Wiki programs that can do the job, but the ability to import things in and make workflows happen make those two commercial programs extremely useful, especially in maintaining documentation.
5: GitHub/GHE. If I have a F/OSS project, and forget about it, I am pretty much certain that 5-10 years from now, it will still be there and usable, perhaps someone finds it, forks it and makes it useful again. Other Git systems... not so much, and when stuff vanishes, that is history lost forever. This needs to have government support, and some sanity (so this doesn't get turned into someone's personal multi-terabyte storage of videos). Maybe more space if people "adopt" it. It also needs to span countries, just so if something happens in Europe, that source code would be available in the US.
6: MDM/RMM tools. Intune has its issues, but the Holy Grail would be something that could manage Macs, Windows machines, and many Linux distributions, as well as iOS, and Android devices. This would be both cloud based as well as available on-prem. This functionality is critical to a business's operations, and needs to be integrated into the OS. Ideally, for Linux, some parameter which can be inputted at install time to have the installer pause, go to a URL, pull code from there and then function like Autopilot or Apple's ABM provisioning.
7: I hate to mention this, but an IRM. Something like MS Purview. DRM is ugly, but in this case, it can be the one thing that is the difference between exfiltration or no.
8: A VDI cloud connection broker, as well as a VDI system. Otherwise, you are paying for Omnissa, Microsoft W365 or AVD, Citrix, or something else, and those are not cheap. Having a VDI system that is inexpensive and works well with Proxmox can bring a critical security tier to a company.
9: Don't laugh... a GPG keyserver combined with transparant GPG in mail apps and webmail. We have moved away from tried and true encryption to stuff based on "trust me". Enough. We need to see about going back to the GPG standard.
Getting rid of Teams is a positive, but to break MS's iron grip, there are a lot of other basic enterprise items which need to be made into vetted, maintained, open source projects.
Re:Can they? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Computershack ( 1143409 ) on Friday February 06, 2026 @08:23AM (#65972454)
None of this is unique to Microsoft nor is it anything that nobody else can provide or create an alternative solution to, it's just that there was previously no real reason to. Well now thanks to the political situation it's been brought home just how urgent it actually is to have an alternative.
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score: 5, Insightful)
by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday February 06, 2026 @02:25AM (#65971962)
Capitalist efficiency is a myth beyond SMEs. From a certain size on upwards, it goes to hell. To be fair, soviet-type manufacturing efficiency is pretty much the same or worse and they also have worse product quality issues in general. But then I look at where Win11 stands now and it is clear that capitalism with monopolies in place can match soviet incompetence easily.
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score: 5, Informative)
by procrastinatos ( 1004262 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @11:35PM (#65971832)
Where do you imagine the literal millions of dollars it would take will come from?
Asked Gemini to come up with some numbers:
- Cost of the MS Teams add-on (ignoring the base license): 5€ per user per month
- Estimated number of public sector employees in the EU: 35 million
That gives you over 2 billion € to spend every year. Seems doable.
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score: 5, Informative)
by procrastinatos ( 1004262 ) on Friday February 06, 2026 @02:07AM (#65971944)
Did we miss something?
Yes, the fact that there are 12 months in a year.
Re:Noble, but missing one key thing (Score: 5, Interesting)
by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @11:24PM (#65971824)
Most users are not very savvy, especially around new software.
That didn't stop people using Teams, a program that not only was rolled out to everyone with virtually no information beyond a few popup tooltips or training, but a program that drastically differed from the norms of other software (like no multi window support).
The users will be fine.
Re:Noble, but missing one key thing (Score: 5, Insightful)
by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday February 06, 2026 @02:28AM (#65971964)
People use MS only because everyone else is using MS. That reduces training when one goes into a new org, and there are zillions of MS how-to videos because it's ubiquitous. It would take a while for a competitor to gain similar.
Exactly. And that is why this is likely a landslide. Whatever the EU Commission is going to use will have contributions integrated upstream and there will be commercial support from many vendors. European IT is in no way inferior, people are just lazy and stick to what they know unless there are very good reasons not to. These very good reasons have manifested now.
Look at the Jokers coming out of the woodwork (Score: 5, Insightful)
by slincolne ( 1111555 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @11:56PM (#65971866)
I'd amazing that people are pitching the creation and integration of a Teams alternative as some mammoth task that only Microsoft can pull off, and attempts by anyone to compete will fail. You should keep in mind the fact that the US is not the sole source of IT expertise on earth, and the EU is more than capable of taking them on. The EU has the ability to pass legislation that can compel Microsoft to co-operate, and access to the necessary skillset is certainly available. The world has seen how broken the US has become recently, and there is no debate that the US will leverage its access to US companies to force outcomes that meet their need - they are in reality no different to China or Russia in that area. Recent development such as the arbitrary and unbalanced tariffs, invading foreign countries and threatening to annex sovereign territories shows that the US are no longer the 'good guys' but are slowly descending into a mess approaching that of other dictatorships around the world. There is every reason for nation states and blocks like the EU to invest in technology that serves their interests over those of the US. The fact that this is being discussed publicly shows that this is not a random thought bubble but rather a signal from people more than capable of competing with Microsoft on this. The idea that a nation state competitor to Teams is not possible is a joke.