In short: 30k users, 40k mailboxes, 100M emails and calendar entries migrated. The client is Thunderbird. The server / web side is handled by Open-Xchange, hosted by a local provider with the same name (AFAICT), which also offers commercial licensing for the otherwise-AGPL suite.
The service gets operated by Dataport AöR. Dataport is the primary service provider / datacenter of some german federal states and owned by them.
They client is mainly Open-Xchange AppSuite Web UI, some people use Thunderbird on top. There are also thousands of mobile devices, syncing via IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV.
Indian government announced its decision recently to migrate the IT software of all its government offices and PSUs (public sector units) from Microsoft to Zoho (an India-based IT company, whose affordable products are good alternatives to Microsoft and Google's products).
Zoho has recently (re)launched Ulaa browser (Chromium fork, alternative to Chrome and Firefox) and Arattai (messenger app, alternative to Whatsapp and Singal), which are getting quite popular (Arattai and Ulaa topped Google Play Store recently in messenger and browser category).
Being a closed-source stack, their CVE disclosures [0] paints quite a sorry picture, unless, of course, they’ve built such mind-blowing security that it makes Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and Google combined look like amateurs.
So you are comparing a Indian company (worth ~$12 billion) to worldwide giants worth hundreds of billions (or even trillions!) that make billions in a few days?
As of October 2025, Alphabet Inc. (Google's parent company) has a market capitalization of approximately $2.999 trillion. This figure represents the total market value of its outstanding shares.
It's a great move. I doubt it will add any substantial security measures, but the fact that more people -either individuals, organizations, or even governments- are disconnecting from the major big tech players is always a good sign and a healthy approach, especially when these few big companies are actively becoming hostile towards their users with different money-grab tactics and invasive technologies. Add to that AI craziness, and you are not a user anymore but a minion or a drone to such companies.
It is really important to not build your national infrastructure around closed-source proprietary software that other nations control.
I lived in Latin America for a year. It is shocking how much everything relies on WhatsApp. I got everything from visa appointments, airline tickets, to restaurant bookings in WhatsApp.
I think we should have regular shut offs for software like we have for emergency and fire situations. This would show the general population HOW reliant they are on some companies software.
I hope we get regular updates. Email deliverability is a frustration outside of the M365/Gmail ecosystems, but it’s not as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be, and I’m optimistic that increased rigour with the implementation of SPF/DMARC/DKIM will lead to better deliverability across the board. I’m curious if they see increases/decreases in spam, missed messages, successful phishing attempts, etc. Lastly, I’d love to know if they have had to change any security policies, and how are they handling identity management across the organization.
I think we're going to be seeing more and more of this type of thing in Europe.
Of course some administrations have already done it before, sometimes sucessfully, like the French gendarmerie and sometimes unsuccesfully like Munich that ended up reverting to Windows (mostly for political rather than technical reasons).
But previously the motivations were difficult to understand for many, either being about saving money on licenses with dubious returns once retraining was considered or about software freedom arguments that are difficult to explain to non geeks.
These days the US is increasingly seen as an untrustworthy partner / supplier in Europe and the digital digital sovereignty arguments are well understood, both by politicians and the general public.
Most FOSS organisations, including the Linux Foundation, are headquartered in the US and are supported by American companies and, most likely, American three letter agencies.
I think migrating away from office is not realistic for many companies. They run on Excel, and just breaking one vital table because it uses a macro can cost much more money than the entire office suite for many users over years. The Munich story was doomed to fail.
(Of course there are lots of things that work, the open source mail or Zoom or Slack replacements are totally fine in my opinion.)
France is currently developing La Suite numérique[1], which includes email based on Open-Xchange. The German federal government also proposes Open-Xchange in their openDesk suite[2].
If more of this happens, especially in email, maybe Google, Microsoft and friends will be forced to democratize their email blacklisting. When countries start suing because email from government agencies is not getting to their citizens, these lists will hopefully get more decentralized.
Been saying it for years: the name of the (IT) game through 2030 and beyond won't be AI, so much as it'll be sovereignty. Everyone played the US' game and got relatively burned to varying degrees, so expect more countries utilize homegrown or FOSS products to retain sovereignty over their digital infrastructure going forward.
Props! I hope they keep it and don't use it as a play to get a better deal from a commercial provider. I am jaded after seeing too many "digital transformation" projects running on a 3-5 year cycle of switching from Offie 365 to Google then back to Office 365.
I’m going to float a compromise that works pretty well and helped us get off Office with absolutely minimal effort…
Exchange Online Plan 1
(the cheapest, no Office)
Apple Mail (Active Sync),
Pages,
Numbers,
Keynote
(all free, perpetually, and mobile apps are available)
Since these are packaged as store apps, we still get basic MDM and the ability to deploy/autoconfigure/autoupdate. Active Sync allows us to get email notifications in near real-time to mobile devices (which is otherwise difficult), as well as wipe emails remotely on lost devices if we need to.
We get data sovereignty by using a Synology NAS, which has a Task to encrypt everything and upload it to Cloudflare R2 as a backup. We could really use any NAS solution, but so far Synology is hands free and can sync everyone’s emails from Exchange to the backup.
Will ditch Exchange when someone finally starts an antitrust on Microsoft/Google email hosting.
The Schleswig-Holstein email migration is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.
If they (and every public body doing the same move) now start donating 50% of their previous costs to the FOSS projects they, that would most notably put mozilla in a much better position to not have to bow to google money and go down the route they did lately.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadThey client is mainly Open-Xchange AppSuite Web UI, some people use Thunderbird on top. There are also thousands of mobile devices, syncing via IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV.
If English had proper 'c' (not just fake 'k' or 's') you could simplify it at least to: 'Massačusec'.
Similarly 'Schleswig' can be compressed to 'Šleswig'.
Zoho has recently (re)launched Ulaa browser (Chromium fork, alternative to Chrome and Firefox) and Arattai (messenger app, alternative to Whatsapp and Singal), which are getting quite popular (Arattai and Ulaa topped Google Play Store recently in messenger and browser category).
https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/meet-ulaa-zoho-s-a...
[0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/14145/
As of October 2025, Alphabet Inc. (Google's parent company) has a market capitalization of approximately $2.999 trillion. This figure represents the total market value of its outstanding shares.
I lived in Latin America for a year. It is shocking how much everything relies on WhatsApp. I got everything from visa appointments, airline tickets, to restaurant bookings in WhatsApp.
Huge national security in my view.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538928
And?
But previously the motivations were difficult to understand for many, either being about saving money on licenses with dubious returns once retraining was considered or about software freedom arguments that are difficult to explain to non geeks.
These days the US is increasingly seen as an untrustworthy partner / supplier in Europe and the digital digital sovereignty arguments are well understood, both by politicians and the general public.
[1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ [2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#email
However we have gotten multiple efforts in Germany that have been rolled back after a new administration takes over.
A few years ago there were a few libraries in NRW using SuSE, and nowadays it is Windows on kiosk mode.
Exchange Online Plan 1 (the cheapest, no Office)
Apple Mail (Active Sync), Pages, Numbers, Keynote (all free, perpetually, and mobile apps are available)
Since these are packaged as store apps, we still get basic MDM and the ability to deploy/autoconfigure/autoupdate. Active Sync allows us to get email notifications in near real-time to mobile devices (which is otherwise difficult), as well as wipe emails remotely on lost devices if we need to.
We get data sovereignty by using a Synology NAS, which has a Task to encrypt everything and upload it to Cloudflare R2 as a backup. We could really use any NAS solution, but so far Synology is hands free and can sync everyone’s emails from Exchange to the backup.
Will ditch Exchange when someone finally starts an antitrust on Microsoft/Google email hosting.
On a nother note: still 1+ year(s) until we get a real email database (enabling gmail like thread view) in TB. [0]
[0] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/video-conversation-view...