# Switzerland starts a pilot to move 3,000 federal computers off Microsoft 365
Switzerland has begun a pilot program to move 3,000 federal workstations away from Microsoft 365 and onto open-source alternatives, according to an It’s FOSS report based on the Federal Council’s latest update. The pilot is only a fraction of the federal administration’s roughly 54,000 computers, but it marks a significant public-sector shift in one of Europe’s most technology-aware governments.
The move follows a proof-of-concept called PoC BOSS, which the Federal Council said involved 172 federal employees testing the openDesk collaboration suite. The report says the trial produced positive feedback for core office work such as document handling and email, while large-scale video conferencing still showed technical limits. That mix of strengths and weaknesses appears to have shaped the next step: a broader pilot rather than an immediate cutover.
The federal chancellery is investing CHF 9 million in the rollout, with the goal of completing the migration by the end of 2027 if the pilot performs well. During this phase, the new environment will run in parallel with Microsoft 365 instead of replacing it outright. That detail matters. Switzerland is not ripping out a long-standing productivity stack overnight; it is attempting a controlled transition that gives administrators time to compare reliability, usability and support costs side by side.
The political logic behind the change is clearer than the technical one. The report cites concerns about foreign access, vendor dependency and rising licensing costs. Swiss officials have argued that relying on a single foreign provider creates operational risk, especially when cloud law in another country could expose sensitive government data to outside authorities. The push for digital sovereignty has become a formal policy priority, with the Federal Council defining it as the ability to carry out essential government functions without depending on an external supplier or country.
This is not happening only in civilian departments. Switzerland’s military cybersecurity unit, Cyber Command, is already moving ahead on a faster schedule and is expected to replace Microsoft 365 with openDesk by October 2026. The separate timetable suggests that national-security use cases are driving some of the urgency, even as civilian administrators proceed more carefully.
The legal framework also matters. The EMBAG law, which came into effect in 2024, requires federal agencies to publish government-developed software as open source by default. That makes Switzerland’s move feel less like an isolated procurement decision and more like part of a broader policy architecture designed to reduce lock-in and encourage reuse across the public sector.
Microsoft is hardly standing still. The report says the company is investing more than CHF 325 million to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in Switzerland, a move that may blunt some sovereignty arguments by keeping more data and services closer to home. Even so, the federal government’s pilot shows that open-source office software has moved from advocacy to implementation. The next real test will be whether the 3,000-seat trial delivers enough stability and support to persuade the rest of the administration to follow.
Event date: 2026-09-07
