Tuta, the German encrypted email and calendar provider, has officially joined Euro-Office.

Unless you have been living under a rock or were trapped in some freaky dungeon, this collaborative effort has brought together many notable European companies.

The participating names include Nextcloud, IONOS, Proton, XWiki, Soverin, EuroStack, BTactic, Open-Xchange, and a few others who are jointly developing an open source document handling solution.

It is in the works as a web-based, AGPL-licensed fork of ONLYOFFICE that is expected to support real-time collaborative editing across documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, with wide format support.

Don’t think of it as a standalone office suite, though. It is designed to be plugged into existing platforms like Nextcloud Hub, Proton Drive, XWiki, or OpenProject, and the first stable release is expected in a few days.

Speaking on the matter, Matthias Pfau, co-founder and CEO of Tuta, added that:

We’ve joined Euro-Office because we see great potential for this project to become a truly sovereign alternative with great usability and data protection. It is built by European engineers, people and companies that you can trust, and it is fully open source.

This is exactly what we need here at Tuta to compliment our encrypted offerings of Tuta Mail, Tuta Calendar, and Tuta Drive.

Why not LibreOffice?

Why LibreOffice was not chosen as the base is not something the coalition has addressed directly. The FAQ on the project’s GitHub page (linked earlier) does mention openness to collaboration with the LibreOffice community and Collabora, with the document converter being highlighted as one area where that could happen.

And there’s still an open question hanging over the project. The Document Foundation (TDF), the nonprofit behind LibreOffice, asked Euro-Office back in April what its native document format would be.

As of today, the question remains unanswered with the official material still framing the project around “great MS compatibility.”

TDF’s argument is that this just relocates the dependency rather than removing it. If they go with the OOXML approach, the server moves to Europe, but the document format stays bound to decisions Microsoft makes.

ODF, the Open Document Format, is an ISO standard with no single company controlling it, and Germany recently mandated it by law for use in public administration.

Nearing a release

I have been keeping an eye on Euro-Office since it was first announced, and there has not been much in the way of official updates on how things were coming along.

But now, the coalition is growing, a stable release is close, and the push for a genuinely European document stack appears to be gaining real momentum. I am curious to see what ships.

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