Today, Open Source alternatives are missing when it comes to the search of complete suites integrating the most common use-cases of collaboration: email, chat, document & knowledge management, issue tracking, user management. IT departments looking for such suites are forced to turn towards proprietary solutions such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workplace.

However, alternatives are in the building. Among them, openDesk, an initiative lead by the German Ministry of Interior, stands out.

This project aims at building a complete Open Source alternative to Microsoft 365, where the software, the integrations, and the infrastructure required for project are to be released under Open Source licences. At the core of this project are several European Open Source software vendors, including Univention (user management), Open-Xchange (email), Nextcloud (file management), Nordeck / Jitsi (video conferencing), Element (chat), Collabora (document editing), OpenProject (project management) and XWiki (knowledge management). Operations on the project are also coordinated by Dataport, a service provider for the German administration.

This presentation will focus on describing the project, its governance, and describe how its different actors organize in order to foster integrations within Open Source products, and thus create a usable platform on top of them. The last part of the talk will show a demo of the current version of openDesk.