For fifteen years, European digital sovereignty was mostly a conference topic. There were declarations, reports, action plans, and at the end of each cycle the public administration went on signing the same contracts with the same providers.
Something has changed. Not in the rhetoric, which was already plentiful, but in the execution. Germany and France have started replacing software in production, with allocated budgets, binding deadlines and real users. It is worth looking at what they are doing, because it is the most advanced experience in Europe and because the lessons are transferable, even for those who are not the State.
Germany: a public company to build the alternative
The German approach began with an unusual decision. Instead of asking the market for an alternative to the American suites, the State created an entity to build it.
The Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität, known as ZenDiS, was set up in 2022 by the Ministry of the Interior as a limited company owned by the federal State, based in Bochum. Its role is to coordinate the development of openDesk, a set of open source office and collaboration tools: email, calendar, shared documents, video conferencing, file management and messaging.
A detail that reveals the philosophy: the ZenDiS team is small, around fifty people, and that is intentional. The entity does not want to be yet another state IT supplier. It wants to integrate existing open projects and contract the European open source economy to develop them. openDesk is the integration of nine independent projects, each with its own community and life cycle.
Adoption has concrete names:
- The company The Bundeswehr, through its information systems company, signed a seven-year framework contract in 2025 to use openDesk as a sovereign workstation.
- The Robert Koch Institute, the national public health authority, uses it with around seven thousand users.
- The The state of Schleswig-Holstein converted tens of thousands of workstations and, in 2025, completed the migration of email across its entire administration to open solutions.
- In Baden-Württemberg, nearly sixty thousand teachers started using the platform in education.
- The The International Criminal Court, after being targeted by American sanctions, announced in October 2025 that it would replace the Microsoft suite with openDesk.
This last case deserves a note. It is not an exercise in industrial policy. It is an institution that discovered, in the worst possible way, that its ability to function depended on decisions taken in another jurisdiction.
On the rules side, there were two equally important steps. In March 2026, the responsible ministry and the German digital industry association agreed standardised contract terms for procuring open source solutions, removing a practical obstacle that had been holding back many tenders. And the Federation and the Länder committed to providing sovereign alternatives to proprietary workstations by March 2027, with the federal administration aiming for October 2028.
France: the State suite, built in plain sight
France took another path, closer to the product and less about institutional engineering. The Interministerial Digital Directorate developed La Suite numérique, a set of open tools for public servants: encrypted instant messaging, video conferencing, a collaborative document editor, storage and email, accessible through single sign-on.
The numbers are what set the French case apart. More than five hundred thousand active public servants per month, across around fifteen ministries and many other administrations. The messaging platform has passed six hundred thousand registered users. The code is published and can be inspected by anyone, with no contract and no account.
And there is one aspect of particular interest to anyone looking at this from Portugal: some of these products were built through cooperation between the administrations of several Member States. The collaborative document editor was born from joint work between the French and German administrations, with Dutch participation. It is not a national product for export. It is a European common good, developed jointly and reusable by anyone who wants it.
Added to this is the French cloud doctrine, in force since 2021, which reserves State systems handling sensitive data for qualified infrastructure immune to non-European legislation. It was this doctrine that, in practice, halted the migration of French ministries to American cloud suites.
What these cases have in common
Three things, and none of them is technological.
First: they stopped treating the issue as a preference and started treating it as a requirement. As long as sovereignty is a tie-breaker in a tender, it always loses to price and habit. Once it becomes an eligibility condition, the market adapts.
Second: they solved the procurement problem before the software problem. The standardised contract terms in Germany and the mandatory qualification in France were more decisive than any feature. Most administrations were not stuck for lack of an alternative. They were stuck for lack of a way to buy it.
Third: they built together. Instead of each country funding its own version of the same text editor, they shared the development. It is the only way for European scale to compete with American scale.
The honest part: this is still at the beginning
It is best not to confuse acceleration with completion.
In April 2026, a reply from the German government to parliament put the number of openDesk licences at around eighty thousand, out of roughly 4.7 million federal civil service employees. That is less than two per cent. In France, despite the adoption figures, several tools are still being rolled out and access is restricted to State employees.
There are also real difficulties that those selling sovereignty tend not to mention: integrating nine independent projects means nine update cycles and nine sources of incidents. Training tens of thousands of people used to another interface takes time and patience. And there is internal resistance, as there always is.
None of this invalidates the direction. It simply shows that change happens in layers, over years, and that those who start later will take just as long.
What this means for a Portuguese organisation
Few organisations are large enough to build their own suite. But there are three lessons that apply to any Portuguese public body or business.
Start with email. It is no coincidence that both Germany and France started with communications. It is the most critical system, the most exposed and, paradoxically, the easiest to change, because it is built on open protocols that any provider supports. A mailbox can be migrated. A document management system with fifteen years of customisations cannot.
Demand open protocols, not promises. The reason these migrations are possible is that the protocols for email, calendar and contacts are public standards. Anyone who depends on closed formats is locked in, regardless of the provider's jurisdiction.
Treat jurisdiction as a requirement in the tender specifications. It is the most transferable lesson of all. There is no need to wait for national plans to write, in the next procedure, that the provider must be subject exclusively to Portuguese and European law.
Germany and France did not discover a new technology. They discovered that the obstacle was never technical.