OpenDesk – a flexible all-in-one office suite for the public sector

https://www.opendesk.eu/de

by gjvc • 9 months ago

116 33 9 months ago

opendesk.eu

ChrisArchitect• 9 months ago

ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837342

g-mork• 9 months ago

Is this just a rip of Collabora or is it more?

luplex• 9 months ago

it's more - it also has email, chat via Matrix, a Wiki, video conferencing and a few other things.

dingnuts• 9 months ago

isn't the metadata from Matrix public? at least, if federation is on? seems useful to the OSINT community but I'd think public offices would have an issue with existing metadata about who is talking to who and when.

topaz0• 9 months ago

The document editing part of it is collabora, and then it has a bunch of extra things around that.

graiz• 9 months ago

We're open! But you can't just download, please request a demo.

kitsune_• 9 months ago

https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk

ugh123• 9 months ago

Can you help me understand how this compares to Google and Microsoft Suite, both in look and features? The site doesn't show much

cachius2• 9 months ago

Someone should host a demo instance. Ideally they themselves.

jslakro• 9 months ago

A good candidate to be in https://european-alternatives.eu/

ksec• 9 months ago

So this is basically just LibreOffice? I have yet to see an online office suite that is good enough to rival MS 365.

majorchord• 9 months ago

Why would you? I don't think anyone wants to waste millions of dollars to make a competing product that most people will never use.

esseph• 9 months ago

If you NEED excel or office specific formats, run 365.

If you DON'T, Google Sheets, Google Docs, OpenOffice etc. work fine.

InMice• 9 months ago

Another office suite. Check

michelsedgh2• 9 months ago

No, its Collabora just rebranded :)

cachius2• 9 months ago

And Collabora is LibreOffice just rebranded.

HotGarbage2• 9 months ago

The system requirements are quite high: https://docs.opendesk.eu/operations/requirements/

Not going to be running this at home any time soon

LaurensBER2• 9 months ago

Requirements intended for initial evaluation deployment (not production usage!):

- 12 cores

- 32 GB ram

- Kubernetes cluster

Finally a use cases for all those awesome overpowered homelabs I see on Reddit.

For the rest of the world this seems excessive. Even for a small company these are pretty unreasonable requirements. I wonder what their design considerations were?

vineyardmike• 9 months ago

Well that’s just the bare-minimum to run it. They said they were targeting like 150k users across the German government, so this is a lot closer to a Google Docs alternative than a home lab use case.

It’s also BYO-database so there is certainly other requirements above and beyond just the stated above when you include running the database clusters.

rstuart4133• 9 months ago

Even for a small company these are pretty unreasonable requirements.

$1,200, fits in the palm of your hand: https://www.amazon.com/MINISFORUM-Pro-370-Desktop-Computer-G...

trklausss• 9 months ago

This is intended for sysadmins in enterprise environment... You can use other suites for home usage.

nhinck2• 9 months ago

My paltry laptop meets these requirements, doesn't really seem that high.

Frieren• 9 months ago

Not going to be running this at home any time soon

Which public administration are you HotGarbage?

HotGarbage2• 9 months ago

Why wouldn't I want to self-host my own Google/Microsoft alternative?

whalesalad• 9 months ago

KDE developers in shambles for having all their app names stolen.

dang• 9 months ago

Related ongoing thread:

ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837342 - Nov 2025 (77 comments)

kkfx• 9 months ago

Me personally I consider EVERY office suite legacy crap, no one should use.

Unfortunately, even if it's entirely possible to imagine an office world built like what we can have today in org-mode/Emacs, e.g. https://youtu.be/u44X_th6_oY rather than Positron (R Studio's successor) for most people it's still a taboo; there's a significant reactionary attitude even in IT.

johnea• 9 months ago

I think this is a great development!

It does illustrate that the EU has started to understand something that S/W devs seem to have totally forgotten: dependencies are bad, use as few as possible.

The rest of the world has not yet caught on. When I was in Japan this past summer, I was shocked at how dependent business, government and individuals are on US internet infrastructure.

I tried describing the ICC situation, and most people (even s/w devs) stared with a blank face.

The main thing I wonder about the opendesk project in general is, why do they think it's only for the "public sector"?

Do government employees use email differently from other people? Does their calendar s/w need some special features?

To me this just seems like an office productivity suite, for everyone.

The opendesk project should expand the concept of who they intend to serve...

OpenDesk – a flexible all-in-one office suite for the public sector

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