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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Euro-Office provides a Europe-based alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
• Digital sovereignty is powering the demand for the open-source Euro-Office.
• The interface and document formats will be familiar to any Microsoft 365 user.

Countries outside of the US are sick and tired of paying for what they see as untrustworthy American-dominated software-as-a-service (SaaS). As a result, many countries and companies -- especially in Europe -- are investing in digital sovereignty initiatives. The latest SaaS to address this need is Euro-Office.

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Euro-Office's 1.0 release, available June 9 for anyone to download from the project's public GitHub repositories, will come with ready‑to‑use web editors for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that support real‑time collaboration. 

The suite is designed to help public authorities, education systems, and regulated industries move away from US‑based productivity clouds while retaining a familiar, Microsoft Office-style workflow for end users. 

European corporate control and open licensing  

The program is being developed by a who's-who of European cloud and collaboration vendors, including Ionos, Nextcloud, EuroStack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian, BTactic, Open‑Xchange, and Office.eu. The last, besides backing Euro Office, also has its own open-source, cloud-based office suite named Office EU. 

The developers argue that this combination of European corporate control and open licensing addresses sovereignty and transparency concerns in a way that neither purely proprietary US suites nor small, isolated open‑source projects can. 

As Achim Weiss, Ionos CEO, explained, "With the geo-political developments we have seen in the last year, there is a clear need for a reliable, fully Microsoft-compatible and easy to use sovereign office solution in Europe. Our joint initiative delivers a suite with an extremely familiar interface and capable of working with documents, presentations, and spreadsheets."

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Crucially for "deploy now" buyers, Euro-Office ships as an integrated component inside existing European collaboration ecosystems rather than as a standalone download that CIOs must wire up from scratch. At launch, the suite will be available as an office integration in products from participating companies, including the latest Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring release, where it can serve as the in‑browser editor for shared documents.

Ionos' managed Nextcloud customers will be able to install Euro‑Office shortly after June 9, and Ionos plans to roll it into its broader Nextcloud Workspace offering later this summer, extending the sovereign stack across its hosted portfolio.

French wiki vendor XWiki expects to integrate Euro‑Office in the fourth quarter of this year, and Dutch‑based Office.eu has also committed to rolling it out, which should put a European‑governed office suite in front of a wide range of enterprise and public‑sector users by year's end.

According to Frank Karlitschek, Nextcloud CEO, "Europe has had the technical building blocks for years. What was missing until now was an initiative to bring them together into a meaningful, comprehensive solution." He continued, "With Euro-Office, we're not starting from scratch; instead, we're taking responsibility for a vital piece of digital infrastructure. This finally gives organizations tools they can trust: transparent, durable, and managed in Europe."

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Although Euro‑Office's contributors and corporate backers are firmly Europe‑based and its messaging is tightly coupled to EU digital‑sovereignty narratives, the code is open to contributions worldwide and can be deployed globally.

While the name, Euro-Office, may make you think it's based on the well-regarded LibreOffice, it's not. Euro‑Office is a fork based on the open-source core of Ascensio System SIA's OnlyOffice. Despite the name, OnlyOffice has no connection with LibreOffice's ancestor, the Apache Foundation's OnlyOffice. Their codebases are entirely different, and they have different open-source licenses. 

While OpenOffice's heart is licensed under the AGPL, Ascensio claims that Euro-Office backers should change Euro-Office's user interface, source code, and add notifications to its code and documentation that it's a derivative work of OpenOffice. This appears to be a tempest in a teapot; I anticipate that Euro-Office will successfully make its shipping date. 

Euro-Office features

The program itself is a web‑based, open‑source editor for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. It comes with real‑time collaboration and strong support for both Microsoft Office and OpenDocument formats. Specifically, it can create, open, and edit DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and other Microsoft Office formats, as well as the OpenDocument formats ODT, ODS, and ODP.

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The program also supports real‑time co‑editing so multiple users can work on the same document, spreadsheet, or presentation simultaneously in the browser. Its collaboration tools include comments, track changes, document comparison, and version history. In the upstream feature set, you can also chat with co-writers and editors while working on documents.

The interface closely resembles modern Microsoft Office with ribbon‑style toolbars and a familiar layout to ease migration from Word/Excel/PowerPoint to Euro-Office. Like Microsoft 365, Euro-Office is explicitly designed as an online office component rather than a full desktop suite.