France, states move off Microsoft

France is pushing its public sector further away from Microsoft, with Paris ordering a shift from Windows to Linux and expanding a state-built video platform across government. (numerique.gouv.fr) France’s interministerial digital office, known as DINUM, said on April 9 that the state will move off Windows in favor of Linux workstations as part of a campaign to cut “extra-European” software dependencies. The same announcement pointed to the national health insurance fund’s migration of 80,000 staff to state tools including Tchap, Visio and FranceTransfert. (numerique.gouv.fr) On January 26, the French government said its in-house service “Visio” would be rolled out across all state services by 2027. DINUM says 15 ministries and many agencies already use it, and the service is hosted in France. (numerique.gouv.fr; lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr) The common thread is “digital sovereignty,” a European policy term for keeping control over software, hosting and data instead of relying on a single foreign vendor. France’s La Suite program says its workplace apps are free software and run on infrastructure hosted in France, with some services using SecNumCloud-certified hosting. (numerique.gouv.fr) Germany’s northern state of Schleswig-Holstein has been on the same track for years. In October 2025, the state said its mail system was being moved in-house, while Nextcloud was replacing Microsoft SharePoint step by step as the main collaboration platform and OpenTalk was being used for video meetings. (schleswig-holstein.de) Nextcloud said Schleswig-Holstein’s sovereign workplace project covers more than 25,000 public administration employees, and the company gave the state an implementation award in 2025 for reducing dependence on big technology vendors. (nextcloud.com; nextcloud.com) Austria’s armed forces have also switched office software. The Document Foundation said in September 2025 that the Austrian military moved 16,000 personal computers from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice after planning that began in 2020 and technical work that started in 2022. (documentfoundation.org) Those moves do not mean Microsoft software is disappearing from Europe’s public sector overnight. They do show that some governments are now treating office suites, video calls and desktop operating systems as strategic infrastructure, with migration deadlines stretching into 2027 and beyond. (numerique.gouv.fr; numerique.gouv.fr; schleswig-holstein.de)