openDesk enters the chat with Element!

Element is delighted to be joining the launch of openDesk at Smart Country Convention in Berlin, 15-17 October.

For those that don’t know already, openDesk is an Office & Collaboration Suite for public administration. The development of openDesk is led by the Centre for Digital Sovereignty in Public Administration (ZenDiS), a limited company created by Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI).

Element was selected by ZenDiS as the real time communications component within openDesk. Element’s decentralised technology supports digital sovereignty, and the Matrix open standard enables easy federation to offer end users connectivity between multiple organisations.

A digitally sovereign office suite

The core principle behind openDesk is strengthening the public sector’s digital sovereignty, which it is enabling by bringing together a suite of office and collaboration products based on open source software. As a result, public sector organisations can easily own and control their technology stack and the data it contains.

openDesk V1.0 offers an intuitive and consistent interface for a collection of powerful open source applications, including word processing, spreadsheets, email, contact and calendar functions, messaging and VoIP.

The complementary components come from carefully selected best-of-breed open source vendors; Collabora, Element, Nextcloud, Nordeck, Open Project, Open-Xchange, Univention and XWiki.

A commercial enterprise version, and a free community version

openDesk V1.0 is an enterprise grade version of the free-to-use community edition, which is already available on the openCode platform. Support for self-hosting is provided by ZenDiS partner B1 Systems, with a data sovereign SaaS offering available from STACKIT, a German cloud provider.

Element at Smart Country Convention

Dr Patrick Alberts, managing director, Element Software GmbH, will be presenting Element as the messaging component within openDesk on the openDesk stand (Hub 27, Stand 317) at the Smart Country Convention at 13:00 (CET) on 15 October.