In January 2026, France’s Minister of Public Service David Amiel made an announcement that sent ripples through the enterprise IT world: 2.5 million French civil servants will stop using Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, and GoTo Meeting. The deadline is 2027.
The replacement is Visio, a videoconferencing platform built and hosted by DINUM, the Direction Interministérielle du Numérique, which is the French state’s digital strategy directorate. DINUM designs government digital services, builds internal software, and sets IT standards across the French public sector.
This is not a pilot. It is national policy.
What France Is Actually Doing
The videoconferencing ban is the headline, but it is part of a much broader shift. France has been quietly building sovereign digital infrastructure for years, and the pace has accelerated since 2024.
The stated aim is to “end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool.” The CLOUD Act is cited explicitly as the driving concern. When your videoconferencing provider is a US company, your communications data is theoretically accessible to US authorities, regardless of where the servers sit.
But it goes beyond video calls. The French government has been deploying Nextcloud for file sharing and collaboration across ministries. LibreOffice is replacing Microsoft Office in multiple departments. The entire approach is built around the principle that critical government communications should run on infrastructure the French state controls.
Why This Is Different from Previous Attempts
European governments have talked about digital sovereignty for years. Germany tried a sovereign cloud initiative that quietly fizzled. Various ministries in various countries have launched pilots that went nowhere.
France is different for a few reasons.
First, DINUM is a serious technical organisation. They are not outsourcing the build to a contractor who will rebrand AWS. They are building and hosting infrastructure themselves. Visio runs on state-approved, state-controlled infrastructure.
Second, this is a mandate with a deadline, not a recommendation. Civil servants are not being asked to consider alternatives. They are being told to stop using the US platforms.
Third, the scope is enormous. 2.5 million users is larger than the entire workforce of many tech companies. If France can make this work at scale, it eliminates the “it doesn’t work for real organisations” argument.
What They Are Using Instead
The French sovereign stack looks remarkably familiar if you have spent any time in the self-hosting world:
- Videoconferencing: Visio (DINUM-built, hosted on state infrastructure)
- File sharing and collaboration: Nextcloud
- Office suite: LibreOffice
- Messaging: Tchap (based on the Matrix protocol)
Every single one of these has an open-source equivalent you can run at home. That is not a coincidence. The French government is betting on the same ecosystem that homelabbers have been building on for years.
The Skills Implication
When a G7 nation decides to migrate 2.5 million users off Microsoft, they need people who can build and maintain that infrastructure. Nextcloud administrators. Linux systems engineers. People who understand Matrix federation. Engineers who can deploy, monitor, and scale open-source collaboration platforms.
These are not theoretical job descriptions. France is hiring for them right now.
And France will not be the last. The Netherlands blocked a US acquisition of their national ID host the same month. Germany is migrating 30,000 workstations. The European Commission just awarded 180 million euros to European cloud providers.
The demand curve for sovereign infrastructure skills is pointing one direction.
Try It Yourself
Here is the thing most people miss: the exact platform France chose for government file sharing and collaboration is something you can install on a Raspberry Pi in an afternoon. No enterprise budget required.
- How to Install Nextcloud with Docker gets you running the same collaboration platform France is deploying across government, on your own hardware.
- Nextcloud Docker Setup: Complete Build Guide covers the full production configuration, Collabora Online for document editing, file versioning, and hardening.
- Ollama on Raspberry Pi 5: Local AI for Data Sovereignty extends the sovereign stack with local AI processing, no data leaving your network.
The gap between “what governments are building” and “what you can learn at home” has never been smaller. France just proved that the self-hosting stack is production-ready at national scale. The skills you pick up in your homelab are the same ones a G7 nation is betting its digital independence on.
Sources: Euronews, Computerworld, ComplianceHub
ReadTheManual is run, written and curated by Eric Lonsdale.
Eric has over 20 years of professional experience in IT infrastructure, cloud architecture, and cybersecurity, but started with PCs long before that.
He built his first machine from parts bought off tables at the local college campus, hoping they worked. He learned on BBC Micros and Atari units in the early 90s, and has built almost every PC he’s used between 1995 and now.
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