The Schleswig-Holstein blueprint – 80 percent LibreOffice migration and what German states, municipalities and SMEs can copy from it in autumn 2026

On 24 August 2026 the bid deadline for the new Microsoft Enterprise Agreement tender in Baden-Württemberg expired – only days after the corresponding deadlines in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony. While state procurement offices review the bids, Schleswig-Holstein has quietly continued on a different path: by August 2026 around 80 percent of the 30,000 state workstations have been migrated to LibreOffice, 44,000 mailboxes run on Open-Xchange and Thunderbird, and Nextcloud is replacing SharePoint step by step. The annual saving is over €15 million in license costs. The blueprint is no longer a forecast; it is a measured reality. For municipalities, states and SMEs looking to use the autumn tenders, the question becomes concrete: what in the blueprint is transferable – and what is not.

What Schleswig-Holstein has actually achieved by August 2026

On 4 December 2025, the Chief of the State Chancellery and Digital Minister Dirk Schrödter published the interim report. The migration has continued to accelerate since. The hard numbers from the official state reports and from reporting by heise online and HiSolutions:

• 80 percent of state workstations use LibreOffice as the standard office suite.
• 44,000 mailboxes have moved from Exchange to Open-Xchange.
• Around 100 million emails and calendar entries were migrated without loss.
• €15 million in license costs are avoided every year.
• €9 million one-off migration and development costs are flowing in 2026.
• End of 2026 is the planned completion date for the full state administration.

The core message: the migration is economical, technically feasible and operationally stable. It is no longer a pilot, it is production.

The six pillars of the blueprint

The Schleswig-Holstein stack is deliberately modular. It can be introduced pillar by pillar – with no big-bang migration required:

• LibreOffice as replacement for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
• Open-Xchange plus Thunderbird as replacement for Exchange and Outlook.
• Nextcloud for file storage, sharing and collaborative editing – replaces SharePoint and OneDrive step by step.
• Linux as desktop operating system, medium-term replacement for Windows.
• Univention Corporate Server as directory service and identity provider – replacement for Active Directory.
• OpenTalk for video conferencing and telephony – replacement for Teams calls and conference rooms.

The combination covers the complete administrative workstation. For the cloud base the state uses a combination of its own data centre in Kiel and the inter-municipal provider Dataport. Neither Microsoft Azure nor Amazon Web Services are part of the architecture.

Why the blueprint pays for itself at €15 million per year

The business case is straightforward. The avoided costs come from three blocks: license fees for Microsoft 365 E3/E5, Azure operating costs for Exchange Online and Teams, and effort for data-protection impact assessments that fall due with every new cloud release. The €9 million one-off investment is recovered after roughly eight months. The structure matches what we have calculated for comparable state and federal procedures in the article on the Bundestag Operation Sovereignty and on the EuroOffice alternative: sovereign stacks come in at 40 to 55 percent below the Microsoft comparison over 36 months.

What municipalities and SMEs can copy from the blueprint directly

The blueprint is explicitly designed for re-use. Schleswig-Holstein publishes configuration profiles, migration scripts and operating playbooks under open licenses. Four elements are ready for immediate adoption by municipal IT leadership and mid-sized companies:

• The Open-Xchange reference architecture including the migration tool chain from Exchange – works for SMEs with 20 to 500 mailboxes too (see Nextcloud for SMEs).
• The Nextcloud configuration for document-based collaboration with Collabora Online.
• The LibreOffice deployment templates including templates for public-sector forms and forms with electronic signature.
• The Univention blueprint for directory services, which replaces an existing Active Directory step by step without end users noticing.

The categorised provider overview with German and European operators for all six pillars is at /en/alternativen. For procurement offices it complements the OpenDesk partner programme run by the federal government, which has standardised procurement and support paths since early 2026.

Where the blueprint stalls – and how to solve the remaining 20 percent

The remaining 20 percent are usually line-of-business applications with hard Windows or Microsoft Office dependencies – resident-registration software, land-registry systems, industry-specific ERP. The path chosen in Schleswig-Holstein: joint procurement across states, negotiation with the vendors of those applications about native Linux or web ports and – where unavoidable – the targeted operation of a small number of Windows terminal servers for specialist users. The rule remains: the standard workstation is sovereign, the exceptions are documented and bounded. Those who want to adopt the systematic approach will find the basic Microsoft vs. open source comparison as an entry matrix.

Summary and next steps

The Schleswig-Holstein blueprint is currently the only statewide reference in which digital sovereignty is not just demanded but operationally run across more than 30,000 workstations. For state and municipal administrations that want to backstop the tenders in NRW, Lower Saxony and Baden-Württemberg with a sovereign successor option, the blueprint is free to use. For implementation we recommend three steps: first, the live analysis of your Microsoft 365 data flows at /en/microsoft. Second, the provider matrix at /en/alternativen. Third, an initial consultation via /en/contact on a migration plan based on the Schleswig-Holstein stack. Price orientation for administrations and SMEs is at /en/pricing.