German State Completes Migration Away From Microsoft Exchange and Outlook ⇥ heise.de

Stefan Krempl, Heise:

The Schleswig-Holstein state administration has taken an important step towards digital sovereignty: After a six-month conversion process, the Ministry of Digital Affairs successfully completed the migration of the state administration’s entire email system from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to the open source solutions Open-Xchange and Thunderbird at the beginning of October.

[…]

Digitization Minister Dirk Schrödter (CDU) is relieved after he recently had to admit errors in the ongoing migration to open source software in a letter to all state employees. There had previously been complaints from the workforce about downtime and delays in email traffic. “We want to become independent of large tech companies,” emphasizes Schrödter. Now, the public sector can also say: “Mission accomplished” when it comes to email communication.

Alternatives like these might not be a good fit for some organizations, and I can imagine the expense and effort of a migration would dissuade many from even attempting it. But it is good that more organizations are exploring alternatives as we should not be dependent on a small number of vendors for our technology needs — especially governments. Open source probably makes the most sense in the public sector.