Kira Herdman

Euro Office recently released the web component of the Euro office stack for download and I have installed it on my server.

I have installed it as I like to use software that is not spying on me, plus I am noisy especially when it comes to software that can let me use less big tech software.

What is Euro Office?

Office EU (Euro Office) is a complete cloud-based office suite (like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) that is 100% European-owned and runs entirely on European infrastructure.

Office EU is designed for organisations and individuals across Europe who refuse to trade convenience for privacy. Whether you’re a small business owner, part of a non-profit team, or a privacy-conscious individual, Office EU adapts to you.

Some big European companies are founding members of the coalition that is making Euro Office, these include :

1. Ionas
2. Nextcloud
3. Eurostack
4. bTactic
5. Soverin
6. OpenProject
7. XWiki
8. Alilian

One of the main advantages of Euro-Office over it’s competitors is there is no vendor lock-in. Euro Office is fully open source.

What has been released?

The web document editors have been released this month. Euro Office has taken the open source code of Only Office and stripped out all the branding and dubious code that Only Office has.

Although the company that makes Only Office, Ascensio System SIA, is based in Lithuania, the parent company of Ascensio Systems SIA is based in Russia.

In the initial release there are no major changes to Only Office apart from what I said above and it doesn’t support any plugin’s like Only Office, but over time this will change.

Why Only Office as a base?

One of the main goals of Euro Office is to have an open source office stack that is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats. This is so it is compatible with the industry standard and the vast am amount of documents that already exist.

Only Office already has good compatibility with the Microsoft Office Formats as well as other document formats like Open Document.

What do you need to run Euro Office?

Well I have it running on my own server via Docker. You do need a document server like Nextcloud or ownCloud.

The latest version of Nextcloud already comes with Euro Office. You have to use the Only Office plugin to get Euro Office to work with ownCloud.

What is it like to use it?

As someone who used Only Office before Euro Office was even announced, I like it. There are some changes to Euro Office like no plug-ins, so there is no AI at all now, which I think is a good thing. The software also seems faster to run on my server, which is a ZimaOS based server with an N100 CPU and 8Gb RAM.

I have not encountered any bugs so far while using it, and it does feel good to use an European Office suite and not tied into any big tech company.

Conclusion

This is very early days for Euro Office. The web document editors are just one part of Euro Office, there will also be a document storage server and maybe desktop office apps, though at the time of writing these are not available.

There will be a lot of changes coming to the suite as a whole, and especially to the web based document editors.

However I think this is a very good first step towards an office suite that is governed by EU data protection laws, arguably the best set of data protection laws in the world.