Data sovereignty with OpenDesk

Katharina Kloiber | 23.02.2026

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openDesk is a complete alternative to proprietary office and collaboration solutions and was developed by the Centre for Digital Sovereignty in Public Administration (ZenDiS) specifically to meet the particular requirements of day-to-day operations within the German public administration.

Open source with a free Community Edition

openDesk is an open-source, sovereign digital workspace designed for collaboration, communication and document management, promising complete transparency and digital sovereignty. To achieve this, established open-source applications from leading German and European providers have been integrated into a highly cohesive solution.

Email, collaborative file editing, chat, video conferencing and more are all brought together in a single interface on openDesk, accessible via a single login and from any browser.

Hosted in Austrian data centres

Over the past few months, we have been working closely with openDesk and have installed the Community Edition on our servers. In addition to the technical fundamentals and the integration of backup and scaling strategies, we have also focused on user testing. Both our internal team and partners from various sectors have been granted access to evaluate the functionality.

We can already see that this development represents a significant simplification when it comes to combining different applications and lays a crucial foundation for digital sovereignty. We are therefore keen to see how the openDesk community develops. What we can say is this: we will definitely be part of it.

Find out more about openDesk: www.opendesk.eu