Euro Office Launches June 9
Europe’s answer to the Cloud Act ships next week.
On June 9th, eight European tech companies are launching Euro Office. A sovereign, open-source replacement for Microsoft 365.
Built in Europe, governed in Europe, stored in Europe.
What is Euro Office
Simple: Web-based editors for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Real-time collaboration. Full support for Microsoft file formats: DOCX, PPTX, XLSX. And Open Document Format.
Built on a fork of OnlyOffice, an existing open-source office platform. The interface is deliberately familiar. If you know where the bold button is in Word, you know where it is here.
The coalition behind it: Ionos, Nextcloud, XWiki, OpenProject, and several others covering hosting, file management, project management, and knowledge systems.
It goes live on GitHub for free on June 9th. It will also be integrated directly into Nextcloud Hub 26.
They announced the project in March and hit a stable 1.0 release in under three months. It’s urgent.
This moment in time
Germany spent €481 million on Microsoft licenses in 2025. Up 76% in just two years. One country, one vendor, one year.
And Germany is full of Microsoft software in every corner of every office.
Across all European governments, the estimated annual spend on American productivity software: over €2 billion.
But the money is almost secondary now.
In June 2025, a Microsoft executive testified under oath in a French Senate hearing that the company could not guarantee data sovereignty if American authorities demanded access under the Cloud Act. France responded by announcing 2.5 million civil servants would migrate off Teams, Zoom, and WebEx by 2027. Then France went further and announced it was planning to ditch Windows entirely for Linux.
Same in Schleswig-Holstein, where I live. I wrote about this when they started. 40,000 civil servants, are migrating off Microsoft’s entire stack: Office, Teams, Outlook, Exchange.
Transition cost: €9 million. Annual savings: €15 million.
Payback period: less than a year. In 2026, roughly 80% of workstations should be completed switched. The rest are on schedule.
Can small businesses use this too
So, Euro Office for the public sector. That’s all well and fine. But what about the millions of small companies running entirely on Microsoft. Can they benefit from Euro Office?
Probably, yes. With caveats.
Euro Office is free and open source. If you have a technical team, you can self-host it. If you don’t, providers like Ionos will presumably offer hosted versions. No GitHub skills required.
For a small team paying €12–25 per user per month for Microsoft 365, the math is fairly simple. Especially if what you mainly do is write documents, build spreadsheets, and share files.
The file format compatibility matters, of course. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX support means you can still exchange files with clients who use Microsoft products.
What you’d lose in v1.0: deep Active Directory integration, the enterprise admin console, advanced macro support. For a five-person agency or a small consultancy, those things probably don’t come up (yet).
What comes up is: can I open this Word file? Can I share this spreadsheet? Can we edit it at the same time?
Those, Euro Office does.
Worth trying before dismissing. Especially given what the alternative costs each month.
It doesn’t need to win
Euro Office doesn’t need to replace Microsoft 365 for most organizations.
It just needs to exist. For free. And without much friction. That will over time help people make the switch, especially the younger generations.
I wrote about this same logic with Wero, the European payment network. Wero doesn’t need to kill Visa and Mastercard. It just needs to exist so European payments can’t be switched off from Washington. Euro Office is the same idea applied to productivity software. It’s also cheaper.
For Euro Office, the demand signals are there, too. Nextcloud saw customer inquiries triple in 2025. In the Netherlands alone, up 8x. Austria’s Federal Ministry of Economy adopted Nextcloud. The city of Stuttgart migrated. Sweden launched a sovereign Nextcloud workspace for the Nordics. Nextcloud has committed €250 million in sovereign infrastructure investment through 2030.
An IDC Europe survey found 45% of European organizations said their interest in digital sovereignty solutions had grown specifically because of geopolitical instability in 2025.
Denmark’s digitalization minister put it plainly: “Europe must never make itself so dependent on so few that it can no longer act freely.”
The downsides of Euro Office
This is v1.0.
Microsoft has three decades of integration, enterprise tooling, and muscle memory on its side. The admin tools. Active Directory. The Excel macros that half of European finance runs on in the background. Euro Office does not have those yet.
Migration is work. Moving off Microsoft means changing habits, retraining staff, and rebuilding workflows that have been running on autopilot for years.
That being said, autopilot here means a lot of issues and problems with Microsoft tools. And those are not getting better.
Microsoft will probably respond by accelerating its “sovereign cloud” offerings in Europe. But the Cloud Act doesn’t go away because you put a European flag on a data center. A US court order still reaches the server room.
Lastly, Euro Office alone isn’t the complete answer.
Most of the infrastructure it runs on still sits on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google cloud. The layer underneath hasn’t been solved yet.
The Bottom Line
Euro Office won’t fix everything. It’s 1.0. It will be rough in places. The enterprise features will take time.
But it exists. June 9th. Free on GitHub. That’s a good start.
For small businesses: it’s worth a look before dismissing it as a government thing. The costs are zero, the file compatibility is there, and the alternative keeps getting more expensive.