The Federal Chancellery completed a feasibility study and briefed the Federal Council in early September. From late 2027, around 3,000 employees are to use an open-source workplace suite covering mail, calendar, documents, telephony and video conferencing. The first phase is costed at roughly 9 million francs.
Headlines turned this into a farewell to Microsoft. The decision says something else. The new environment runs alongside the existing one and doubles as a fallback if that one fails. It is not rolled out to everyone, but to staff working in particularly critical processes.
That selection is the transferable part. Sovereignty here means staying able to act in an emergency, not being independent of a vendor. For a mid-sized company that translates into three things: name the two or three processes that must keep running when nothing else does, rehearse an outage as an exercise rather than on paper, and actually pull the data export every contract promises. Building a second capability costs money every year and rarely pays off across a whole company. The questions behind it cost nothing.