Cloud & Data Sovereignty

Europe has built its own Microsoft 365 — and New Zealand businesses should be watching

A new, fully European productivity suite called Office EU has launched as a direct alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Here is what it is, what it is likely to cost, how moving to it works, and why the idea behind it matters even on the other side of the world.

By Computer Services Ltd  ·  Managed Information Technology & Cyber Security  ·  June 2026  ·  7 minute read

For more than two decades, almost every New Zealand business has run its working day on software owned by a small number of very large American companies. Email, documents, file sharing, video calls — most of it sits inside Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. That has worked well. It has also created a quiet dependency that most organisations have never had a reason to question.

In Europe, that question is now being asked out loud. In March 2026, a company in The Hague launched Office EU: a complete, cloud-based office suite that does the same everyday jobs as Microsoft 365, but is owned, operated and hosted entirely within Europe. It is one of the clearest signs yet that "where does our data actually live, and whose rules govern it?" has moved from a niche concern to a board-level one.

At Computer Services Ltd we keep a close eye on shifts like this, because the thinking behind them reaches New Zealand sooner than the products themselves do. Here is a plain-English look at what Office EU is, what it costs, how a move to it would work, and — most importantly — what it means for businesses here.

What Office EU actually is

Office EU is a single online workspace that bundles together the tools a team uses every day. Rather than being built from scratch, it is assembled from well-established open-source technology — chiefly the Nextcloud collaboration platform, with document editing handled by Collabora Online, an office engine based on LibreOffice. Everything runs inside European data centres and is governed by European law.

The suite is organised into familiar building blocks:

• EU Drive — file storage, sharing and collaboration, comparable to OneDrive or Google Drive.
• EU Docs, EU Spreadsheet and EU Presentation — real-time document, spreadsheet and slide editing, with compatibility for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats.
• EU Email and EU Calendar — mailbox, scheduling and invitations inside the same workspace.
• EU Talk — chat and video meetings hosted on European-only infrastructure.

The pitch is straightforward: keep the whole working day in one place, be transparent about the technology underneath it, and remove the dependency on a single foreign vendor. It is worth noting this is closely related to a separate open-source project called Euro-Office, a sovereign office engine backed by Nextcloud and the German provider IONOS that reached general availability in June 2026. Office EU builds on and integrates that work.

What does it cost?

This is where honesty matters more than a headline number. As at the time of writing, Office EU has not published a fixed per-user price list. The company has committed to a few clear principles instead:

• Pricing will be broadly comparable to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, rather than a budget product.
• It promises transparent pricing with no hidden costs, with both monthly and annual billing.
• Customers will be able to change plans or cancel at any time, with discounts signalled for non-profit and education organisations.

The more useful way to think about cost is total cost, not the licence line alone. The argument Office EU makes is that a simpler workspace with fewer moving parts reduces the hidden costs — administration time, user confusion, and the sprawl of add-ons — that quietly inflate the real price of a platform over its lifetime.

How a move would work

The biggest barrier to changing any workspace is rarely the software itself. It is the fear of a messy, high-risk switch — lost email, broken calendars, downtime on the day everyone is busy. Office EU has designed its onboarding to take that fear away, and the staged approach it uses is exactly the one we would recommend for any platform migration, regardless of vendor.

The process runs in three deliberate steps:

1. Connect. Link your existing Microsoft or Google account to the new workspace.
2. Import. Bring across email, calendars and files. This relies on standard protocols — Internet Message Access Protocol for mail and Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV for calendars — with a guided migration service handling the heavy lifting.
3. Keep working. Run Office EU alongside your current system until you are confident, then switch fully when you are ready.

The principle behind it — no forced cutover on day one, no downtime, no lost history — is the gold standard for any change of this kind. Start with one team, move files or email first, confirm everything is correct, then expand. A staged rollout turns an intimidating switch into an ordinary, low-drama project.

The catch for New Zealand: it is Europe-only

Here is the part that needs to be said plainly. Office EU is built for Europe. Availability is limited to the European Union plus the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway, and the entire proposition rests on data never leaving European jurisdiction. It is not a product a New Zealand or Australian business can simply sign up for today, and we are not suggesting you should try.

So why give it a second thought from Auckland? Because the idea it represents is already on its way here, and two parts of it are directly relevant right now.

Why it still matters here

1. Data sovereignty is becoming a New Zealand conversation too

The question driving Office EU — who ultimately controls our data, and under whose laws — is not unique to Europe. Under the Privacy Act 2020, New Zealand organisations are accountable for how and where personal information is held, including when it is processed offshore. Government, health and other sensitive sectors increasingly expect clear answers about data residency. The European response is an early, well-funded example of a trend that will shape procurement here, and being able to speak to it with clients is part of giving good advice.

2. If you operate in or sell to Europe, this is on your radar

Plenty of New Zealand exporters, software companies and professional services firms handle the data of European customers and are therefore subject to the General Data Protection Regulation. For those organisations, a European-hosted workspace is no longer a curiosity — it is a genuine option worth understanding, and a question your European partners may eventually ask you about.

A simplified way to think about the trade-off

The practical takeaway

Office EU is built for the European market and is not generally available here, so it is not something we could deploy for a New Zealand or Australian business today. For most of our clients Microsoft 365 remains the right platform in any case — particularly with the security and management capability bundled into the business plans. But the launch is a useful prompt. With Microsoft pricing rising from July 2026, and data sovereignty climbing the agenda for regulators and customers alike, this is a sensible time to ask three questions of your own setup:

• Do we actually know where our data is held, and whose laws govern it?
• Are we paying for capability we use, or for complexity we tolerate?
• If we ever needed to move, how hard would it really be?

Good answers to those questions are worth having whether or not you ever change a thing. That is precisely the kind of review we help our clients work through.