Switzerland's Federal Chancellery is preparing to roll out a free and open source software workplace suite to roughly 3,000 government employees, running in parallel with Microsoft 365, according to a September 9 report from The Register. The program represents part of Switzerland's broader push for digital sovereignty, mirroring similar moves across Europe. Meanwhile, the Swiss Armed Forces are moving even faster on their own migration away from Microsoft tools.
The chancellery's initiative will serve about 3,000 selected staff out of approximately 47,000 total federal employees, according to The Register. The platform is expected to become available to these users by the end of 2027, with the first phase carrying a price tag of CHF 9 million (£8.2 million, $11.1 million). For context, Swiss Radio reported last year that the federal government had spent CHF 1.1 billion (£1 billion, $1.4 billion) on Microsoft licenses. The program follows a proof-of-concept feasibility study called BOSS that launched last year and tested browser-based free software tools with 172 users, examining functions such as document editing, email, calendar, contacts, tasks, file storage, audio and video conferencing, chat, and identity and access management.
The report states the study carefully outlined four key limitations to its scope: it would not replace Microsoft 365, would not offer 1:1 functionality, would not provide full M365 compatibility, and would not be permanent infrastructure. The chancellery determined that the browser-based suite was suitable in principle for key standard tasks, though it also identified technical and operational limitations. The next phase will cover less than 10 percent of federal employees and is expected to take roughly 15 months, using the openDesk suite from German state-owned enterprise ZenDIS—the same collaboration suite that Mecklenburg-Vorpommern adopted in July, following neighboring Schleswig-Holstein in 2025.
The shift is part of the Swiss government's Digital Switzerland Strategy 2026, announced in Bern at the end of 2025, less than a month after its Federal Council's report on Swiss digital sovereignty, The Register notes. These moves also follow the 2024 introduction of the Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks, known as EMBAG. The government has developed fresh interest in open source, with the chancellery now maintaining an online catalog of its own open source tools. The Swiss Armed Forces are advancing more rapidly, aiming to complete their migration by October 2026—next month at the time of writing—following a local precedent set by Austria, whose military representatives presented a talk on their LibreOffice migration at the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest last September.
Switzerland's cautious rollout signals recognition that moving off dominant platforms requires managing user expectations around compatibility and feature parity, not just cost savings. The broader European momentum behind digital sovereignty initiatives suggests governments are increasingly willing to accept trade-offs in exchange for greater control over their technology infrastructure.