At a press event in Berlin organized by IONOS, Nextcloud, and many other European businesses and organizations today unveiled Euro-Office, a solution for document, spreadsheet, and presentation processing, developed as a true cross-sector community collaboration of over a dozen different organizations.
A preview is immediately available.
The effort, supported by major European technology companies such as IONOS, Nextcloud, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian and BTactic, plans a first stable release by the summer.
Need for a non-dependent Office
Across Europe, public administrations, businesses and educational institutions are reassessing their reliance on non-European productivity platforms. While office software remains critical, there is currently no solution that combines full compatibility with Microsoft formats, a familiar user experience and genuine digital sovereignty under European management.
“With the geopolitical developments we have seen over the past year, there is a clear need for a reliable, fully Microsoft-compatible and easy-to-use office solution in Europe,” says Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS. “Our joint initiative offers a suite with a highly familiar interface and capable of working with documents, presentations and spreadsheets.”
Existing alternatives often require compromises in compatibility and usability, are burdened by legal risks with licenses and trademarks, or are developed without transparent and open oversight, and without an independent, viable community of contributors. For organizations handling sensitive information and public data, this creates risks.
Euro-Office is directly addressing this gap.
It is designed to provide seamless management of widely used document, spreadsheet, and presentation formats, while offering an interface that minimizes retraining and transition friction.
All code is released under fully open source licenses, free from trademark restrictions, and developed in a transparent process open to public scrutiny and contribution.
The result is an office suite that is built not just for functionality, but also for strategic resilience. “Europe has had the technical building blocks for years. What was missing until now was an initiative to combine them into a meaningful, integrated solution,” says Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud.
“With Euro-Office, we are not starting from scratch. Instead, we are taking responsibility for a vital piece of digital infrastructure. This finally gives organizations tools they can trust: transparent, resilient and managed in Europe.”
Community initiative
Euro-Office is a coordinated European initiative that brings together commercial open source companies, independent developers and civil society actors in a common governance framework.
The initiative is currently led by IONOS, Nextcloud, XWiki, OpenProject, OpenXchange and Btactic across Europe. Together, these participants represent a broad spectrum of Europe's open technology ecosystem and have committed to contributing significant resources to the project.
The coalition aims to create a sustainable ecosystem around Euro-Office and invites other companies, public sector bodies, community contributors and all other civil society organizations that support open standards, digital rights and sovereign digital infrastructure to join the collaboration and help shape the evolution of the suite.
A Tech preview is available
A public tech preview of Euro-Office is immediately available on github . The preview allows organizations and individuals to evaluate core functionality, test compatibility, and provide feedback ahead of the first stable release scheduled for the summer.
The project uses technology originating from ONLYOFFICE developers.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
