Switzerland budgets 3,000 francs a seat for an office suite alongside Microsoft 365

Nine million francs across 3,000 users is 3,000 francs a seat ^[19]. That pays for the set-up phase, which is all the Federal Chancellery has scoped so far ^[3].

Parliament allocated the money for the development of a sovereign Swiss open-source platform for office automation, and the Chancellery is drawing on those funds ^[10]. No migration comes with it: M365 remains the standard environment ^[5], and the Chancellery is not promising a complete replacement, only an additional working environment for now ^[8].

Underneath the 9 million sits one feasibility study, PoC BOSS, for Office Automation with Open-Source Software ^[11]. For the practical test, 172 people from all departments were given access to a browser-based openDesk environment and 73 of them evaluated the predefined scenarios, so 99 of those with access filed nothing ^[13][20]. The average of 5.4 out of 6 across twelve scenarios, which is 90 per cent of the scale, comes from those 73, and ratings varied significantly depending on the department ^[14][21]. The technical final report from the Federal Office for Information Technology and Telecommunication designates openDesk as a tested alternative and open-source-based workplace suite for the federal administration ^[12].

The guidelines for digital sovereignty were adopted in December 2025 and have been binding for the central federal administration since January 2026 ^[15]; the first users reach the platform at the end of 2027, about two years later ^[2][22]. The administration's IT head had already described the parallel openDesk test in a c't interview covering federal dependence on Microsoft ^[23].

Sovereignty procurement now has a per-seat price and a parliamentary line item ^[10][19]. What the Chancellery has actually scoped is narrow: BOSS was set up to explore emergency office automation and the secure processing of sensitive information ^[18], the users are those working in particularly critical business processes ^[6], and the platform is meant to run independently but in parallel with M365 ^[4]. Switzerland does not define digital sovereignty as complete independence from manufacturers or technologies. It defines it as maintaining control and the ability to act, and systematically balancing dependencies, data protection, information security, costs and resilience against each other ^[16].

Phase one could produce an operating cost per seat that compares well with the standard estate, in which case 3,000 is the first tranche of something larger. It could fail that test, leaving the Confederation with a permanent 3,000-seat standby environment covering email, calendar, documents, telephony and video conferencing for critical staff ^[7]. Or the department-by-department spread in the acceptance scores decides it, with some departments taking the seats and others leaving them idle ^[14]. The Chancellery has committed to none of those. It says complete independence is not realistic in most cases ^[17].