More than 40,000 French government staff have begun using a home-grown video conferencing platform called Visio, part of an accelerated push by Paris to replace U.S.-based productivity and conferencing tools across the central government by 2027. All French central government agencies must submit plans to replace U.S. technology, including office software, antivirus, artificial intelligence, and databases, by this fall.

Visio is one component of LaSuite, a set of productivity tools that the Direction interministérielle du numérique, known as DINUM, has been developing since at least 2023. The suite also includes the instant messaging app Tchap, the email platform Messagerie, the file sharing tool Fichiers, the text editor Docs, and the spreadsheet software Grist. Some of the LaSuite software remains in beta. Visio supports calls of up to 150 people, offers AI transcription, and is built on technology from the French firms Outscale and Pyannote. Tchap has 420,000 active users, with 20,000 civil servants adopting it each month.

All data processed by the French alternatives must be handled in France and stored with providers approved by the cybersecurity agency ANSSI. On April 23, French officials announced plans to move the country's health data platform from Microsoft to the local cloud provider Scaleway. At the start of April, DINUM said 250 employees would begin trialing Linux, and 30 have already switched.

"It is important for the French government to be in control of the technology that it is using, with data being stored locally in the country, not abroad," Stéphanie Schaer, head of DINUM, said. "We are confident enough to use it every day and we are not dependent on just one actor that will tell us you have to use my video conference."

Schaer said the project draws on shared code. "We are based on open source software. So we don't develop all the code," she said. "We can reuse what has been developed by the community and we contribute to this community." The code for the French alternatives is published on GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft.

France's effort is part of a wider European push. The Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Finland have ongoing digital sovereignty programs, and in December, eight countries, including France and Germany, announced a partnership on their digital sovereignty efforts. Earlier this month, the Dutch government moved its open-source code from GitHub to a Forgejo instance on government-owned servers. In November, the ICC announced plans to move from Microsoft to the open-source alternative OpenDesk.

Frank Karlitschek, founder and CEO of Nextcloud, said, "The movements in Europe have accelerated over the last decade due to the Snowden revelations and multiple unlawful EU-US data sharing agreements, as well as Trump." He added, "With each of those events, the skepticism towards overseas cloud services was growing."

"The one that's probably moved fastest has indeed been France," said Martha Bennett, principal analyst at Forrester. "Where France has the advantage is that it's a very centralized, centrally controlled country." The French national police force has used GendBuntu, a customized version of Ubuntu Linux, on thousands of devices over the last two decades.