A group of European technology companies, with IONOS and Nextcloud at the forefrontand in which The Catalan Btactic also participatesa consulting firm specialized in free software and cloud computing solutions for companies; has announced the upcoming availability of a sovereign european office suite, who have been called Euro-Office.
It is a suite designed to replace American office suites, such as Google Workspace and, above all, Microsoft Office, which has the support of a large part of the European open source community at a business level and whose design has focused, in addition to offering the features expected from this type of tools, on adopting an intuitive design and solid compatibility with the files developed with the applications of the aforementioned American technology suites.
Thus, Euro-Office will allow you to edit and create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Although its final version will not arrive until next summer, its technical test version is now available on GitHub, so that interested professionals and companies can begin to test its capabilities and main functions, in addition to testing its compatibility and being able to send their feedback to the companies that have participated in its creation.
It is important to note that Euro-Office is only the editing and creation of office files component, and is designed to integrate into cloud storage services, online wikis, project management tools and other programs.
In this way, for example, those who have a presentation hosted on an online or local server where they are using Nextcloud and also have Euro-Office installed, clicking on their file will open the Euro-office presentation editing and creation component.
In view of this, in addition to making the work of user companies easier, it prevents companies that provide cloud platforms (or that provide systems to be installed locally) from having to develop their own elements for editing documents, spreadsheets or presentations from scratch.
In addition to IONOS, Nextcloud and Btactic, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin and Abilian, among others, have participated in the project. For its creation, a fork of OnlyOffice was used, a suite whose open source components have been reviewed to avoid conflicts, in addition to adding others created specifically for the suite by the suite’s developing companies.
The coalition recognizes that there are other alternatives to the American suites, particularly Microsoft’s, but they point out that they often require agreements regarding compatibility and usability with third parties, face legal problems regarding licenses and trademarks, or are developed without transparency or open governance.
This leads to them not having an independent and sustainable community of contributors. In the case of organizations that have to manage and use public data and sensitive information, using these types of solutions can cause problems.
Euro-Office addresses these situations directly, as it is designed to offer frictionless management of general and widely used document formats, spreadsheets and presentations; with a familiar interface. Thus, it is compatible with both the proprietary Microsoft Office formats and those of OpenDocument, used in suites such as LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
All of its source code has been released under an open source license, free of trademark limits, and has been developed through a transparent process open to public review and input. Thanks to this, Euro-Office, in addition to being designed to offer maximum compatibility, has also been developed with resilience in mind.
Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOShas highlighted that «Given the geopolitical events we have seen in the last year, there is a clear need for a sovereign office solution in Europe, easy to use and fully compatible with Microsoft. Our joint initiative offers a suite with a very familiar interface, capable of working with documents, presentations and spreadsheets«.
On the part of Nextcloud, according to CEO Frank Karlitschek has stressed that “Europe has had the basic components for development for years. What was missing until now was an initiative to bring them together into a complete and meaningful solution. With Euro-office we do not start from scratch, but rather we take responsibility for a vital piece of digital infrastructure. This finally brings companies tools they can trust: transparent, durable and managed in Europe.«.
In fact, the developer group presents Euro-office as a coordinated European initiative that brings together companies from the open source environment, independent developers and civil society actors in its development, under the umbrella of a shared governance framework.
Those responsible for the group, with the presentation of Euro-Office even before the arrival of its first stable version, want call on other companies, public sector organizations, community taxpayers and other civil society actors that commit to open standards, digital rights and sovereign digital infrastructure; to join the projectoy collaborate on it to help in the evolution of the suite.
