Next month, European technology companies will release the first stable version of Euro-Office, giving governments and businesses around the world a fully operational, sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
Next month, European technology companies will release the first stable version of Euro-Office, giving governments and businesses around the world a fully operational, sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
Distrust of American dominance in the cloud software market has led governments and companies outside the US (especially in Europe) to invest heavily in their digital sovereignty. The main response to this demand has been a new European project called Euro-Office, whose official release of version 1.0 is scheduled for June 9, ZDNET reports .
This open-source cloud-based office suite will be available on GitHub and will include ready-made tools for working with texts, spreadsheets, and presentations in real time,
The main goal of the product is to help government agencies, educational institutions, and businesses abandon American clouds like Microsoft Office, while maintaining the interface familiar to users.
Leading European cloud service and software providers were involved in the development: Ionos, Nextcloud, EuroStack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian, BTactic, Open-Xchange and Office.eu.
The authors are convinced that the combination of strict European control and open licenses guarantees data security and transparency that neither US monopolists nor small isolated startups are able to provide.
Euro-Office is being released as an integrated component within existing European collaboration ecosystems, rather than as a separate distribution that IT directors would have to configure from scratch. At the time of release, the package will be available as a built-in office solution in the products of the participating companies. In particular, in the fresh spring release of Nextcloud Hub 26, it will be able to act as a browser-based editor for shared documents.
Although Euro-Office's developers and corporate sponsors are based exclusively in Europe, and the project's positioning is closely tied to the idea of EU digital sovereignty, its code is open to contributors from around the world, and the software itself can be deployed globally.
The name Euro-Office might suggest that the project is based on the well-known LibreOffice package, but this is not the case. Euro-Office is a fork built on the open source OnlyOffice from Ascensio System SIA. Despite the similarity in names, OnlyOffice has nothing to do with LibreOffice's predecessor, the OpenOffice package from the Apache Foundation. Their code bases are completely different, as are their open source licenses.
Although the core of OnlyOffice is licensed under the AGPL, Ascensio claims that Euro-Office partners must change the user interface, source code, and add notices in the code and documentation that their product is a derivative work of OnlyOffice.
The program itself is an open-source web editor for working with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. It supports real-time collaboration and is fully compatible with both Microsoft Office and OpenDocument formats. In particular, the program can create, open, and edit DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and other Microsoft Office formats, as well as OpenDocument formats — ODT, ODS, and ODP.
The program also supports real-time co-editing, which allows multiple users to work on the same document, spreadsheet, or presentation simultaneously, directly in the browser. Teamwork tools include comments, change tracking (review mode), document comparison, and version history. In addition, the basic set of features of the original project allows you to chat with collaborators and editors directly while working on documents.
The program interface is very similar to modern Microsoft Office with a ribbon toolbar and familiar layout of elements, which simplifies the migration from Word, Excel and PowerPoint to Euro-Office. Like Microsoft 365, Euro-Office is designed specifically as a component of an online office, and not as a classic software to install on a computer.
Це ж москальський софт, якого біса?