Euro-Office text editor implemented.
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ZDNET Highlights
- Euro-Office provides a Europe-based alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
- Digital sovereignty is powering the demand for an open-source Euro-Office.
- The interface and document format will be familiar to any Microsoft 365 user.
Countries outside the US are tired of paying for what they see as unreliable US-dominated software-as-a-service (SaaS). As a result, many countries and companies – particularly in Europe – are investing in digital sovereignty initiatives. The latest SaaS to meet this need is euro-office.
Also: France is abandoning Windows for digital sovereignty – and its new Linux stack is taking shape
The 1.0 release of Euro-Office, available to download on June 9 from the project’s public GitHub repository, 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 maintaining a familiar, Microsoft Office-style workflow for end users.
European corporate control and open licensing
The program is being developed by a number of European cloud and collaboration vendors, including ionos, nextcloud, eurostack, wiki, open project, sovereign, abelian, btactic, open‑exchangeAnd Office.eu. In addition to supporting Euro Office, it also has its own open-source, cloud-based office suite called Office EU.
Developers argue that this combination of European corporate control and open licensing addresses sovereignty and transparency concerns in a way that neither fully proprietary US suites nor small, isolated open-source projects can.
As Achim Weiss, CEO of Ionos, explained, “With the geopolitical developments we have seen over the past year, there is a clear need in Europe for a reliable, fully Microsoft-compatible and easy-to-use sovereign office solution. Our joint initiative offers a suite with an extremely familiar interface and is able to work with documents, presentations and spreadsheets.”
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Importantly for “deploy now” buyers, Euro-Office ships as an integrated component inside the existing European collaboration ecosystem rather than a standalone download that CIOs must wire up from scratch. At launch, the suite will be available as an Office integration into participating companies’ products, including the latest NextCloud Hub 26 Spring ReleaseWhere it can serve as an in-browser editor for shared documents.
Ionos’ managed NextCloud customers will be able to set up Euro-Office as soon as June 9, and Ionos plans to add it to its broader NextCloud Workspaces offering later this summer, expanding the Sovereign stack across its hosted portfolio.
French wiki vendor
According to Frank Karlitscheck, CEO of NextCloud, “The technology building blocks have been in place for years in Europe. What was missing until now was an initiative to bring them together into a meaningful, comprehensive solution.” He added, “With Euro-Office, we are not starting from scratch; instead, we are taking responsibility for a significant part of the digital infrastructure. This ultimately gives organizations tools they can trust: transparent, sustainable, and managed in Europe.”
Also: Fed up with Microsoft and Google? This new European office suite is a private, open-source alternative
Although Euro-Office’s contributors and corporate supporters are strongly Europe-based and its message strongly aligned with EU digital-sovereignty narratives, the code is open to contributions worldwide and can be deployed globally.
While the name, Euro-Office, might lead you to think it is based on the well-known libre officeit. Euro-Office is a fork based on the open-source core Sole Office of Asensio System SIA. Despite the name, OnlyOffice has no relation to LibreOffice’s ancestor Sole Office of the Apache Foundation. Their codebases are completely different, and they have different open-source licenses.
While the heart of OpenOffice is licensed under AGPLAsensio claims Euro-Office supporters should change Euro-Office’s user interface, source codeAnd add notices to its code and documentation that it is a derivative work of OpenOffice. It appears to be a tempest in a teapot; I hope Euro-Office will successfully finalize 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.
Also: How digitally sovereign is your organization? This Red Hat tool can tell you in minutes
The program also supports real-time co-editing so that multiple users can work simultaneously on the same document, spreadsheet or presentation 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-authors and editors while working on documents.
The interface 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.
