The new joint venture gives openDesk a unified commercial front as the open-source suite takes aim at Microsoft 365.
The press release reads: “Open Productivity: six open source vendors form joint venture for openDesk.” Reading the press release, I thought it was an announcement about openDesk, which is the product that most of us will see. The release was kinda vague about that, leaving me imagining some kinda Nextcloudesque host it yourself something or another that contains everything a business might need — including the kitchen sink.
But when I went to openDesk’s website, I could find no “download now” link, just something that smelled very much like a proprietary offering that said something like “click here to book a demonstration.” From the description, openDesk is supposed to be some kind of combined effort that includes access to software from Collabora Productivity, Element, Nordeck, Open-Xchange, Univention, XWiki, Nextcloud, and OpenProject — which are all commercial, for-profit, respected open source companies, who were all somehow tied to Open Productivity.
I finally gave up trying to figure it out on my own and contacted Gerald Pfeifer, who’s Open Productivity’s managing director. He recently left SUSE after nearly 23 years, leaving as its EMEA CTO. We talked the old fashioned way: through emails.
The Open Productivity, OpenDesk Lowdown
He explained that openDesk was created by ZenDiS, working with eight open source software vendors. ZenDiS, or the Center for Digital Sovereignty in Public Administration, is a federally owned German company tasked with helping federal, state, and municipal authorities reduce dependence on proprietary big tech vendors (read: American big tech), mainly through the use of open-source software.
“Six of these eight vendors founded Open Productivity to provide a unified ‘vendor role’ as openDesk goes to market,” he said. “We all work hand in hand, it’s just that partners and customers often want, or need, to have a more consolidated experience.”
The two vendors that aren’t part of Open Productivity are the host-it-yourself cloud company, Nextcloud, and the web-based, open-source project-management platform, OpenProject. The openDesk platform itself is browser-based, with apps being deployed on Kubernetes, making the platform a pretty formidable bundle of software.
“I forget the exact number, though believe it was sixty-plus containers in our own deployment, plus databases, storage, and other helpers, so this is nothing one would set up from scratch in an hour or two.”
Who’s It For?
“The minimum setup we recommend at this point is some hundred users, if not some thousand,” Pfeifer said. “OpenDesk right now targets medium to large and very large enterprises and organizations.”
While it’s not targeting small fry like you, me, or FOSS Force, the idea looks well-suited for those large enterprises — especially those in Europe and other parts of the world with government policy encouraging a move away from proprietary software from US-based big tech vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Google, in favor of open source software and other tech that’s preferably homegrown.
“I’d say its primary purpose is giving organizations — be it public sector, critical infrastructures, or business — an open, sustainable, and secure alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.”
Pfeifer pointed out that since the platform is built on proven components, “it already does a good job of that.” It also helps that the platform itself has also already gone through some battle testing:
“There are successful deployments particularly in the public sector in Germany and PoCs [proofs of concept] in various countries over here (France, Germany, Switzerland…),” he added. “Admittedly, most current users are not very public about it yet.”
The Big Options
From where I sit, the big decision here for users is similar to the decisions that enterprise Linux users have been making for decades: do you want to go with handholding, support, and maybe a few added bells and whistles, or do you want to ride bareback and manage the whole thing yourself. It’s open source, so the choice is yours.
“The openDesk Community Edition is double free: ‘free as in beer’ in addition to ‘free as in speech,'” Pfeifer said, using the old open source adage to explain that not only is it open source (free speech), it also costs nothing to download, install, and manage yourself (free beer).
“In addition to the community edition, which is comprised of all eight (plus) components, there is an Enterprise edition with support, SLAs, some different branding, plus some extra modules/tools on top,” Pfeifer said. “The current minor release is 1.19, and there is a new one coming out every month, bringing both closer integration, easier deployment, and depending on respective release cycles, version updates of components like Collabora Office Online, Element, Open-Xchange, or XWiki.”
There are two basic ways — with some variations — to get the Enterprise Edition. You can host it yourself in your data center with commercial support, which is probably best for enterprises in regulated industries, or you can go with the no-fuss, no-muss SaaS edition which is hosted and operated for you.
If any of this has tripped your interest, you can find out more at the websites for Open Productivity and openDesk.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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