Microsoft alternatives – migration to open source technologies

We are developing a migration strategy from Microsoft 365 to open source technologies for a large German research company. On the one hand, it’s a question of regaining cyber souvereignty and, on the other hand, of meeting increased security requirements. This is to be achieved by using free and open source software (FLOSS). Overall, the project is similar to the Microsoft Alternatives Project (MAlt) at CERN and the Project Phoenix of Dataport.

The principles of the project are:

The same service should be offered to all employees
Vendor lock-ins should be avoided in order to reduce the risk of dependency
Most of the data should be owned by the research company

We evaluate alternative solutions for many services, implement prototypes and pilot projects.

Product group	Service	Product to evaluate	Status
Identity and access management	LDAP	OpenLDAP	🏭 Production
Personal Information Management	eMail	Zimbra	🚦 Evaluation
	Calendar	Zimbra	🚦 Evaluation
	Contacts	Zimbra	🚦 Evaluation
Collaboration	File sharing	NextCloud	🏭 Production
	Office integration	NextCloud	🚦 Evaluation
	Direct mails/chat	Mattermost	🏭 Production
	Video conferences	Jitsi Meet	🏭 Production
Search	Search engine	OpenSearch	🚦 Evaluation
	Frontend/ Visualisierung	OpenSearch Dashboards	🚦 Evaluation
	Authentication/ Access control	Open Distro Security	🚦 Evaluation
	k-nearest neighbors	Open Distro KNN	🚦 Evaluation
Project management	Issues/Milestones	GitLab	🚦 Evaluation
	Time tracking	gitlabtime	🚦 Evaluation
	Documentation	GitLab Wiki	🚦 Evaluation
Research software [1], [2]	Package manager	Spack	🏭 Production
	IDE	JupyterHub	🏭 Production
	Development environments	Jupyter Kernels	🏭 Production
	Software versioning	Git	🏭 Production
	Data versioning	DVC	🏭 Production
	Gathering and storing data	Intake	🛫 Pilot
	Spreadsheet	ipysheet	🏭 Production
	Geospatial data	PostGIS	🏭 Production
	Map creation	OpenStreetMap	🏭 Production
	DevOps	GitLab CI/CD Pipeline	🛫 Pilot
	Documentation	Sphinx	🏭 Production

Hosting strategy

There are essentially three different hosting variants within the research company:

Society-wide infrastructure: Infrastructure, which is used by most of the research projects and administrations across the institutes, is to be provided by the research company’s central IT.
Institute-wide infrastructure: Infrastructure that is required for the special research areas of one institute or that needs IT support on site should be provided by the IT of the respective institute.
Operational and geo-redundancy: These are mainly produced through institute cooperation or through cooperation between individual institutes and the IT of the research society. In terms of technology, floating IPs and the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) are used for this, with decisions being made on the basis of BGP announcements.

[1]	There is extensive German documentation for the infrastructure on which the research software is developed, which is published under the BSD 3 Clause license: Jupyter Tutorial PyViz Tutorial

[2]	The planned uniform API represents a significant simplification here; see also Announcing the Consortium for Python Data API Standards.