GoKawiilSwitzerland's federal government has launched a pilot program to replace Microsoft 365 with open source alternatives across 3,000 workstations. That's about 7% of the federal workforce. The target is to complete the migration by end of 2027.
This move follows a successful proof-of-concept and a new digital sovereignty law. A separate fast-track military migration is also already underway.
The great migration goes into the pilot phase
The Federal Chancellery is investing CHF 9 million in an open-source workplace rollout for 3,000 federal employees.
On September 3, 2026, the Federal Council published results of "PoC BOSS", a feasibility proof-of-concept involving 172 federal employees who tested the openDesk suite, a German open-source collaboration platform.
During the proof-of-concept phase, core office tasks like document processing and email received positive assessments, while large-scale video conferencing still showed technical limitations.
Based on the 'success' of the PoC phase with 172 employees, the pilot is now launched for 3,000 employees.
Do note that during the pilot phase, the new system runs in parallel with Microsoft 365 rather than replacing it outright. That's okay, I think. Migration of such kind should be gradual rather than sudden.
If the pilot is successful, we might expect the migration to continue on all the 54,000 workstations owned by the federal administrations. That's my guess.
Why?
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