Germany’s defence is going to start using OpenDesk, an alternative suite made of various open source tools (Collabora, NextCloud, OpenProject, Cryptpad, Jitsi, and others) in a move to replace Microsoft for more sovereignty.
Press release (in German): https://zendis.de/ressourcen/bwi-und-zendis-schliessen-rahmenvertrag-ueber-souveraene-kommunikations-und-kollaborationsloesungen
OpenDesk: The office and collaboration suite for public administration | openDesk
not sure why the docs are in german but for those seeking more info: Erste Schritte | openDesk Hilfe
It must be quite a lot of effort to maintain this, really wonder how this will all tie together also with change management and software life cycle.
Unfortunately, nextcloud’s e2ee implementation is both unreliable and insecure. Hopefully they’re encrypting the files locally before uploading them to nextcloud.
I feel sorry for those that will have to use Matrix
Hey, they were using Teams, so it can’t be worse than that 
what could damn possibly go wrong right?
Though I gotta say Matrix with all the defence using their own homeservers and not others and assuming the homeserver is well secured would have been far more resilient than using Microsoft Teams
or eff it, Threema OnPrem
the clients for matrix suck hard imho. I have never enjoyed using it. Teams is not amazing but it works more reliably in my experience. I think there is a lot to do to actually make this work but i am happy that they will give it a go.
Cryptpad is not a panacea. Nor are Matrix and Nextcloud.
But honestly it can’t be worse than Microsoft, which does not develop its software in the interests of its users at all. It is not end to end encrypted, require accounts, has bad telemetry,AI, bad licenses policies, and so on.
In addition I think that having a big entity such as the German defense could enhance those tools’ popularity.