FOSS Force’s Christine Hall reports that six of the eight open source vendors behind openDesk, the sovereign workplace suite created by Germany’s state-owned ZenDiS, have formed Open Productivity as a joint venture to give the platform a single commercial vendor front against Microsoft 365. Managing director Gerald Pfeifer, who left SUSE after nearly 23 years as its EMEA chief technology officer, said Collabora Productivity, Element, Nordeck, Open-Xchange, Univention and XWiki are the founders, while Nextcloud and OpenProject remain part of openDesk without joining. The product is split between a community edition that is free to download and self-manage and an enterprise edition adding support, SLAs, different branding and extra modules, offered either self-hosted with commercial support or as a hosted SaaS subscription; deployments start at roughly a hundred users and target large public-sector, critical-infrastructure and enterprise organisations. Hall notes that openDesk’s site offers no direct download and instead directs visitors to book a demonstration.
Six of Eight openDesk Vendors Form Open Productivity for Digital Sovereignty
FOSS Force's Christine Hall reports that six of the eight open source vendors behind openDesk, the sovereign workplace suite created by Germany's state-owned ZenDiS, have formed Open Productivity as a joint venture to give the platform a single commercial vendor front against Microsoft 365. Managing director Gerald Pfeifer, who left SUSE after nearly 23 years as its EMEA chief technology officer, said Collabora Productivity, Element, Nordeck, Open-Xchange, Univention and XWiki are the founders, while Nextcloud and OpenProject remain part of openDesk without joining. The product is split between a community edition that is free to download and self-manage and an enterprise edition adding support, SLAs, different branding and extra modules, offered either self-hosted with commercial support or as a hosted SaaS subscription; deployments start at roughly a hundred users and target large public-sector, critical-infrastructure and enterprise organisations. Hall notes that openDesk's site offers no direct download and instead directs visitors to book a demonstration.
Source: FOSS Force