Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack

Germany's northernmost state bins Outlook – and tens of thousands of Redmond licenses

Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany, has finally concluded one element of a long-running project to eject Microsoft from its infrastructure by giving Exchange Server the boot.

Officials announced a "milestone for digital sovereignty in the country" with the completion of a project to migrate "more than 40,000 accounts and well over 100 million emails and calendar entries" away from Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook to Open-Xchange and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Schleswig-Holstein has been working on replacing Microsoft Office with LibreOffice for some years. The Register first reported on the move to LibreOffice in 2021. However, now that it's replaced Outlook, the government can move on with uninstalling Office. Still underway is the replacement of Microsoft SharePoint with Nextcloud, and it's testing out desktop Linux too.

As The Register has examined before, Schleswig-Holstein's is not the first such effort. The City of Munich moved to Linux in 2013, but some four years later, it began a project to switch back to Windows.

This time, it's about digital sovereignty – keeping European data under European control, as emphasized by the EU's Civil Society Alliances for Digital Empowerment (CADE).

This isn't a new development. The Reg was reporting on the Schleswig-Holstein government's privacy concerns way back in 2011. However, we would find it richly amusing, given its famous MAGA slogan, if it were the Trump administration that provided enough incentive to overcome European bureaucrats' objections.

Top German news site (and occasional Register partner) Heise has some deeper coverage in English. As recently as a month ago, it was reporting some problems, but the migration ultimately succeeded.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Seattle, there's a new Schleswig-Holstein question, posed a century and a half after the original. That question was in part about whether the region should belong to Denmark or Prussia. This year, some of the Danish government already made similar moves, as did the City of Lyon. Heise also reports that the Austrian military is doing similar.

The French national police force, the Gendarmerie nationale, runs more than 100,000 workstations on its own GendBuntu distribution.

The region sometimes called Sleswick-Holsatia is the latest to use FOSS to help Eurocrats break free from proprietary software and services provided by foreign powers on another continent. ®