On the path to digital sovereignty with an EU workplace stack

Insight & Challenge Accepted

Our workplace stack was heavily influenced by US services: Google Workspace for email, Drive and meetings, supplemented by tools such as Notion, Harvest, Reclaim.ai and Slack. Practical, efficient, scalable – but also very one-sided.

For us, it was less of an acute danger and more of a learning curve that affects many other companies in the same way:

• How do we deal with dependencies on individual cloud providers?
• What alternatives are there in Europe?
• And how suitable are these solutions really for everyday use?

These were exactly the questions I wanted to answer for us. Instead of sitting back and doing nothing, I said: Challenge Accepted. The use of local hosts and cloud providers such as IONOS, StackIT, etc. is a growth area.

Step 1 – Screening & evaluation

In order to approach the project in a structured manner, I divided our existing stack into categories:

• Communication & collaboration
• Document management & file sharing
• Productivity & organisation
• Finance & operations
• Security & access

I defined criteria for each category: data storage in the EU or Switzerland, open standards (e.g. CalDAV), integration, performance, costs, support and user-friendliness.

The screening showed that many providers promised GDPR compliance, but often lacked transparency when it came to the details. Others were a pleasant surprise – especially open source solutions that can be combined with German or Swiss hosting.

Step 2 – The new stack

Communication & collaboration

• Proton Mail & Proton Calendar (Switzerland) for secure communication and scheduling
• Rocket.Chat (hosted in Germany) for internal chats
• Slack will remain in place during a transition phase, as several partner companies are still connected via Slack
• We are considering Matrix with Bridges as an option for more elegant Slack integrations in the future
• Own Jitsi instance (Germany) for video conferencing

👉 Transition problem: Integrating Rocket.Chat with Slack is technically feasible, but complex. Chatbots and bridges do not work smoothly. Therefore, we are currently taking a hybrid approach: Rocket.Chat internally, Slack for external partners.

Documents & file sharing

• Nextcloud (Germany) as the central platform
• OnlyOffice integrated into Nextcloud for collaborative document editing – more functional and powerful than Google Docs/Sheets/Slides
• Proton Drive (Switzerland) as secure cloud storage

Productivity & Organisation

• Kollective as a replacement for Notion – almost identical Markdown support
• Nextcloud Deck as a replacement for Trello
• Nextcloud Tasks, synchronised via CalDAVx5 with the Tasks.org** client** (instead of Google Tasks / Reclaim.ai)
• Nextcloud Whiteboards as a replacement for Miro – currently functional, but not yet at Miro’s workshop level

Before and after at a glance

Step 3 – Open issues & next steps

Not everything is perfect yet. Three major areas remain to be addressed:

• Video conference rooms: Jitsi works very well remotely, but integration with hardware systems in meeting rooms is difficult.
• AI support: Many convenience features in Google and Notion depend on AI. We are looking into alternatives such as Aleph Alpha and Mistral.
• Scheduling assistants: We lack tools such as Reclaim.ai, and an EU alternative is not yet in sight.
• Whiteboards: Nextcloud Whiteboard is a start, but it is not yet a replacement for Miro in large workshops.

Conclusion – A step towards digital sovereignty

Our journey shows that it is possible to build a complete workplace stack with European solutions. Not everything is as convenient as its US counterparts, and some convenience features are still missing. However, the new stack is significantly more cost-effective than the previous workplace stack.

But today we have:

• Full data sovereignty
• Hosting in Germany and Switzerland
• Open standards and interfaces
• Resilience against geopolitical risks

For us, this step was not a retreat, but a conscious move forward – towards digital sovereignty, sustainability and independence.