This is just a Nextcloud rebrand with a confusing domain name. It claims "Core is [100%] Open Source" but no source code is provided beyond what's already available in the upstream projects, and it's unlikely that there will be (as this happens a lot). It's a one-man project without a track record or certifications based out of a shared office space [1].
And don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with starting a business rebranding Nextcloud and keeping your development closed source, as long as you're honest about that, which this initiative is not.
If you're looking for a Nextcloud hoster, there's a long list of partners here [2] that have contractually obligated themselves to contribute back to Nextcloud for every user they onboard.
Is this by some random company that happens to rent an address in Hague? And even that is uncertain because there's no actual address except a vague OSM pin. And no company name either.
This seems untrustworthy, double so for a product that claims to prioritize transparency.
> Our headquarters are in The Netherlands (The Hague). Contact us to book a meeting or ask any questions.
I laud the attempt and I think it's important there are more projects that try to compete with their American counterparts. I do want to gently note that if your entire pitch is "we are a bold, independent European alternative that liberates you from the hegemony of the established American players," maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office."
> maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office."
Surely you mean "Microsoft 365 Copilot"?
(I am not making this up. That is what it is called now.)
Realistically, though, I think pretty much _all_ office suites have been called [Something] Office, for about the last 30 years. The Google one ("Google Workplace", formerly "Google Apps") is the only exception I can think of, and I wouldn't necessarily take Google's lead in software branding (honestly, until I looked it up for this post, I thought it was still called Google Apps, and I use the damn thing every day).
Well iWork too. Before that, AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, but yeah, there's things like OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/LibreOffice/NeoOffice which are pretty much all the same lineage (StarOffice and its derivatives). Zoho's is Zoho Office Suite, which at least adds an extra word.
For me, the charitable interpretation is that office is very close to a default term for the category of the software. Open Office, Libre Office, WPS Office, Only Office, Polaris Office.
One thing that may contribute to Europe's and the world's independence from Office is the notion that it's no longer a term distinctly associated with a Microsoft product.
I don't entirely disagree though because they could have attached some distinguishing prefix or suffix. Maybe that's what the .eu is.
I think they could've worked a little harder to at least find a noun you could futz with so it has some commonality between european languages. "Office" is probably well known, but it doesn't "feel" very european to use a noun that's different from most other EU languages translation. Could be "Productiv" or something. It feels like the federal government here in Canada has a team of language nerds ready to smash together a clever french-english name with two superimposed meanings when needed. ("O-Train", Ottawa Train, Au Train. "Via Rail". "Service Canada". "ArriveCAN". etc)
You can't tell me there isn't a few turbo-nerds somewhere in the entire continent of europe that will find the intersection of 6-7 languages to name an EU groupware suite.
"Office is now Microsoft 365, the premier productivity suite with innovative productivity apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows are combined in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app—with a new icon, new look, and even more features."
You can count on Microsoft to mess up their marketing message in the craziest ways. Why stick with the best-known productivity software brand on the planet when you can call it "365 Copilot"?
I doubt this will stop the lawsuit. Also Microsoft still absolutely sells Office 365 tiers separately from Microsoft 365 tiers. Their marketing is terrible and confusing but Offie definitely still exits as a brand, and you can bet your bottom dollar the lawyers are going to be having a great day on Monday.
Microsoft does not have a trademark for "Office", which is clearly a type of product and can't be used as a program name (just like you can't name your oatmeal "Oatmeal" and expect trademark protection).
The only way this would be infringing is if office.eu usage could be confused with Microsoft other's trademarks - like Microsoft Office - but I don't see that.
So no, office.eu will have a calm Monday on that front, just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name.
(I'm not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer before deciding to take on a trillion dollar company).
I can't wait to launch my Office alternative in Cameroon, office.cm. I do suspect using such a generic TLD swap of Office's well-known domain for a knockoff is particularly perilous compared to others mentioned. Bear in mind the possibility for consumer confusion is a top criteria.
I mean, I think that ship has probably sailed. Borland Office showed up at about the same time as Microsoft Office, in the late 80s. Then StarOffice, Corel Office, Wordperfect Office, throughout the 90s... If Microsoft had a defensible trademark there, then this would hardly be the first target. And Microsoft barely uses the "Office" brand _itself_, these days, and hasn't for years.
(There is still a product called Microsoft Office, but the thing that most users would think of as MS Office is now, bafflingly, branded "Microsoft 365 Copilot".)
To be fair, one interpretation is spending innovation tokens wisely. Just piggy back off an already understood concept/brand, don't try to be too clever on the parts where innovating won't matter that much.
There's a bit of an issue with the overload of 'office' in the political context, this being an EU initiative and domain but other than that I say good call.
It also possibly sets a false expectation of perfect compatibility… you can imagine bureaucrats trying to figure out if a file needs to be opened in Office or Office (new)
Considering that for the average office worker I know switching from outlook to outlook (new) is a major hurdle within the same ecosystem, I can only imagine what they were thinking coming up with a name.
That is a very fair point, there are quite a few businesses and government agencies where I live, which are very deeply entrenched in very complex, decade spanning VBA based workflows that need absolute and fully compatibility before a switch away from "MS 365 Copilot" could even be considered and the name may give false expectations.
Now, I really, very much dislike it that often discussions on sites like this one can be utterly derailed by someone bringing up an utterly unrelated overhyped topic, so feel free to dismiss this, but I could honestly see LLMs providing a potential path to smoothing out such issues. Some model have gotten rather robust when it comes to making targeted changes to pre-existing Excel files dating back to before I was using a computer, including handling very specific modifications to ancient macros across multiple sheets. Perhaps, this could be leveraged to some extent, though being honest and trying not to overhype, I suspect that similar to those planning to use agentic coding to rewrite decades old, tested, crucially important COBOL code in a more modern language, there are likely many edge cases that will be hard to properly cover and if such a solution isn't both absolutely reliable and seamless to the users, large scale adoption by such entities will likely be impossible in the short term.
Focusing on the word "Office" feels like a bit of red herring considering it's frequently used in other Microsoft Office replacements like LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
Something like "EuropaOffice" would have followed the historical pattern so it's specifically the lack of an additional qualifier word that's perhaps questionable, not the word "Office."
But it does look like it's always called "Office.EU" in branding so maybe that's enough?
What I get out of that pitch is "use us because we're local to you, and possibly because you're required to, not because we're and good, or that we'll even try".
I mostly interact with smaller contributors to their field, and they tend to be unique and bold, because that's what is needed to be competitive. When they get their uniqueness and boldness out of just being who they are, it doesn't tend to foster the type of uniqueness and boldness needed to make a good product.
In the current climate, using MS Office is a business risk for European companies. Who knows what idea will pop into ol' minihands' head next time he has a bad day at the golf course? Like, it would _not_ be particularly shocking if at some point in the next 2.5 years he attempts to interfere with the ability of US companies to sell services to Europe. You can no longer depend on "but that would be an obviously terrible idea, so they won't do it" as an operating principle; see the tariffs.
Frankly, right now, there is a lot of money to be made in just providing safer alternatives to American cloud stuff. They don't need to be _better_, they just need to be based in a stable jurisdiction.
The product they're replacing is called Microsoft Copilot 365 :)
More seriously, Office is a great word for what the software package does, and it can't be trademarked. You can have Microsoft Office, Libre Office, and Europa Office.
In fairness, Office is as generic a term as one can come up with for such a software suite. On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised if that fell under Genericide like Lego or Google and, lest we forget, the Microsoft Office brand does not exist anymore, it is 365 and Copilot now...
Yeah, someone could confuse it with WordPerfect Office, Ability Office, Libre Office, WPS Office, or some other obscure software that uses the word "Office" in it's name.
What is Office EU?
Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on Nextcloud Hub. It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform.
Looking through the Office EU screenshots, they do look like Nextcloud Groupware/Files/Office with the logo changed.
Mostly adding this because I wasn't sure if it was a new product or not based on a first glance over the Office EU site. Nextcloud offers recommendations for providers on their site, most of which are in the EU [0]. The Office EU website seems to be new since around January of this year [1]. More managed hosts for Nextcloud is a good thing in my book, but I'd be a bit wary to host my stuff with a brand new provider.
You say "tax money", but this project isn't a government project or using public money at all. As for contributing back to Nextcloud: there is a long list of Nextcloud partners [1] that contractually obligated themselves to contribute back to Nextcloud for every user they onboard. The company in this article has not.
It's always a good thing to have multiple players and I hope we can have actual EU-based alternatives, but I feel like this project, simply being a rebranded NextCloud as far as I can tell, is less interesting than La Suite numérique [1] developed by the French government or CryptPad [2] developed by XWiki, a French company based in Paris.
Microsoft draws over 3 billion dollars out of Norway yearly. We are many that want this number much, much closer to zero. At it's small steps like this that makes it possible.
The fund owns about 1.26% of Microsoft (data seems to be for 2025), which according to Gemini is about $37.5b in today's value. Stock value of Microsoft changed about 5.23% over the last year, which comes down to about $1.96b, so you're not far off...
It's hard to get numbers on what countries pay to Microsoft. The Dutch parliament has repeatedly asked and has not gotten numbers even though there is a whole agency since 2014 (https://www.digitaleoverheid.nl/overzicht-van-alle-onderwerp...) specifically for giving Microsoft preferential treatment in procurement.
Well that's a pompous headline from the author's PR dept. "Europe" as in, "The European Union", or just some marketing trick based on making you believe it is to give it more weight?
I'm european and can still easily confuse the "European Union" and "Europe the general area" when context is lacking, it's not a big stretch of the imagination for me that people _anywhere_ could construe this as "official" as well.
All that it looks like is backed by some emanation from the city of The Hague. No mention of the EU proper. It's european owned and backed, sure, but not EU owned and backed.
> Office EU is a complete cloud-based office suite
Issue is.. if you are a traditional MS Office "poweruser", the last thing you want to do is spend your days in a web browser. These apps should also be available as native apps, similar to MS Word, Excel, Pages, Keynote, etc.
The vast majority of office use at my work is in the browsers because the files are stored in Sharepoint. It seems to work well enough for basic needs (no macros and fairly simple formulas in excel etc.)
I have a non-technical friend in finance who uses the Desktop versions of Excel for most of their work and they say it crashes nearly every day losing work.
Every time SharePoint/Teams decides to open a document in the browser, I cry a little. Misalignments in Word, broken basic keyboard movements in Excel, terrible performance across the board.
> Office EU will offer simple plans for individuals and teams. Pricing will be competitive and designed to be easy to understand. We will publish full plan details closer to launch.
> Will there be a free plan?
> A free plan is planned after launch. It will be a good way to try Office EU before committing. Exact limits and features will be shared when it is ready.
Am I being dumb: they say it's "open-source software" but I can't actually find a link (or links) to the software / source anywhere on the office.eu website??
Yes, I searched for the same. No evidence this has anything to do with the European Union. More like a vibe-coded landing page with user signup form.
Edit: I am certain this is one or two people vibe coding then will pitch to VCs when the waitlist has 1000 people.
Listing major company logos in their banner:
“The organizations listed here use similar technology (Nextcloud) as part of their operations. Their inclusion is for illustrative purposes only.”
>"Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on Nextcloud Hub. It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform."
Of which, Files, Talk, Office and Groupware are all just NextCloud services where they've swapped "Nextcloud" for "EU" in the name.
>"Office.EU is a service offered and operated by EUfforic Europe BV, registered with the Dutch chamber of commerce under registration number 98746243 and having its address at Dr. Kuyperstraat 10-A at (2514 BB) The Hague, the Netherlands."
I wouldn't personally trust a company that appears to be claiming another company's services as some revolutionary new thing, when it's just reselling them. And it was registered in November 2025 with no other information available - why would anyone gamble all their company data on a company that has appeared as quickly as it might disappear? Who are the owners/founders even?
Nextcloud does not provide hosting, only 3rd level support. So any commercial hosting of Nextcloud will be done by other companies. There are many companies to choose from.
It's a perfectly not reasonable cookie banner. If you click on Details, you can see that they're not using marketing, statistics, or any other kind of cookies apart from the technically necessary. Which is great, but also means that they don't even need a banner. It could just go away.
In general getting EU grants is very lucrative. It takes some relationships and writing skill but in the end you never have to deliver any results (beyond maybe a report that no one ever reads)
Really, just lack shame and sell something you do not have and bet that you can get it before anyone really presses too hard. It's an incredible thing to see.
They list a bunch of companies under the heading "All these companies work with the same technology" on their landing page. I think it's quite scummy, and very non-impressive when you see it.
You can have hosted Nextcloud on Hetzner, with Headscale, email server, Vaultwarden, and Wordpress on European infrastructure (Hetzner) individually installed just for you from Federated Computer today for $19/month unlimited user accounts. I use it every day. Human support, too...!
Sure you can, you can also pirate Microsoft Office (the versions prior to the shittening). But companies don't want that, they just want to pay a few bucks per user per month to make it someone else's problem. Microsoft offers this service. Google offers this service. FOSS does not.
That's also why always-connected SaaS is winning - it makes more things the vendor's problem instead of the customer's problem. Provided that you maintain a good relationship with your vendor. A metal machining company doesn't want to hire an employee to manage a bespoke computer system, or even to replace computer parts or install Ethernet cabling in the building. They might do it, if it's the only good option, but they prefer it to just work without effort, even for more money.
Umm.. this feels like a better suited comment for another part of this thread. Federated Computer appears to offer the exact same service as OfficeEU - a SaaS/managed Nextcloud
The problem is that the Oslo world is deeply encoded into the DNA of the European union and its elites. The very goal of "restoring" the old world is what they have in mind. The moment that goal seems to even just return as a hallucination, they will drop all of these initiatives and defect. Everyone knows, so nobody even tries to get something real built.
With the university who trained these politicians, with the institutions who shaped them, with these politicians who created this multi-crisis - believing everyone out there was invested in a stable world as they were- a independent Europe is not possible. They just have to much hackable surface, to much API, they will crawl before any hacker offering them a way "back out" with the decades to come.
That's a cloudflare anycast address; your traffic won't be routed through Texas unless you're in or near Texas. Cookiebot would appear to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usercentrics
The problem is that every attempt at European alternatives is taken at the government level (of some member country or of the EU) and immediately announced with great fanfare as the European comeback. The pathetic thing about it is that everybody who isn't totally clueless sees how utterly inadequate these attempts are, given the political involvement, the microscopic resources invested, the lack of incentives from competition, and the general hostility of European legislation and bureaucracy. And yet politicians keep making fools of themselves announcing this or that EU answer to American tech.
I can't find any info about the people behind it. The branding, mentioning "The Hague" and the rest of the landing page seems to try really hard to fool me into believing this is official from the European Union, I wouldn't trust them with anything, just get Libreoffice.
Good luck to them, but without an equivalent to Microsoft Access it's not really a replacement for Microsoft Office for many power users. (Yes, I'm aware that Access has some weaknesses as a database but for quick-and-dirty custom applications it's still the easiest platform out there.)
In 25 years I have never seen anyone use Microsoft Access in earnest. For the overwhelming majority of users I do not think this is an issue. The last time I used it was when studying for CLAiT Plus.
... Wait, people are still using MS Access?! I didn't even realise that there was still a current version.
> but for quick-and-dirty custom applications it's still the easiest platform out there.
So I'm a big LLM sceptic. Seriously, you can check. But if there is one thing that LLMs _are_ quite good at, it is the sort of quick and (very) dirty custom CRUD apps traditionally produced with Access.
As an American, I remember when none of this was an issue a mere 18 months ago, and it’s crazy to think we did this to ourselves. This is all so unnecessary… and dumb, very dumb.
>1.1 Introductie
>Op 28 maart 2024 heeft de gemeenteraad van Amsterdam unaniem ingestemd met het
(gewijzigde) initiatiefvoorstel Amsterdam Digitaal Onafhankelijk van raadslid IJmker
English:
>On March 28, 2024, the Amsterdam City Council unanimously approved the
(amended) initiative proposal Amsterdam Digital Independent by Council Member IJmker
Some European countries were trying to reduce their dependency on proprietary American software for decades now, with varying success. The recent events have likely accelerated this trajectory, but it is not new.
But I work in IT and Office 365 is not "Office suite online" anymore. Office 365 started with running Exchange in the cloud by MS as it is a PITA for IT. That was basically it.
Office 365 is now:
- Office suite, both online and desktop apps (Vital for full feature Excel)
- Entra for Users, Groups and Policy, SSO, conditional access, MFA (Entra is actually Azure AD, not sure if this is still the case but all Office 365 get an Azure AD tenant it runs on)
- Device management via Intune, that is policy, push apps/installs, reinstalls, Autopilot, run scripts etc on machines, device state config
- File sharing with Sharepoint & Teams & personal Onedrive (this also adds endpoint backup)
- Teams - chat, video, workspace - We live in Teams at work.
- Email (that includes admin, extensive admin)
- DLP - Data loss prevention
- The power suite where users & admins can make their own apps
+ MS Graph API for all this
Oh, and it comes with Copilot chat baked in (GTP 5.3 based now) with enterprise controls.
At a big company you can have people ONLY working on the Entra part to secure user accounts. Or people ONLY on Intune to setup and manage PCs, policy etc.
Office 365 is a beast and I will argue GSuite does not match up as companies basically HAVE to buy Slack on the side to get parity. Also sysadmin on GSuite sucks.
The link actually made me laugh but also sad. It is frankly embarrassing. We in EU can do tech Spotify, Klarna, Lovable, Mojang, Dice, Arelion, Ericsson and this is only in Sweden. Look at a 4G network, it is insanley complex.
So yea not sure what the solution is. But this is too little too late. It should have started in 2008 maybe they would have a chance. It is also sheer numbers. MS is massive and Azure/O365 is their cash cow now. They make sure it is damn good.
wtf!? I enter my email address for an invitation, receive a link to an est. 2 pages form for answering a shit load of unrelated question, like org name, org country, last summer vacation, first time I got pimples... Is this a request to become the next pope?
This has been a longtime coming, it is not unique but it is still significant
The enormous momentum of the installed base and occupied headspace of Microsoft systems made them lazy and complacent decades ago. They have been peddling insecure unreliable software for a generation now, and believed their was no viable threat.
It took too long, but finally. Trump and his mad bad actions are good for the Europeans like a heart attack is good for your health
