CERN Endorsing Microsoft Alternatives Like ownCloud, Kopano, Alt-Office Suite

CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and much more, has been working on alternatives to Microsoft software and recently some of their recommended options for various tasks / application replacements was published.

Back in June we reported on CERN working to migrate away from Microsoft projects and find other software alternatives that besides Windows, Skype for Business and other Microsoft proprietary software license/fee increases were eating into their budget.

After evaluating various open-source and freeware replacements to various proprietary software packages they have been relying on, recently they put out a guide detailing some of the replacements and their current status within the organization.

Among the items are using Kopano as a mail / calendar / contact / tasks replacement, WebRTC for telephony purposes, FreeIPA for Kerberos/LDAP, KeyCloak for SSO, Mattermost for instant messaging / chat, ownCloud for file hosting, Alt-Office for office software, Draw.io for drawing, JIRA + DHTMLX Gantt for project management, OpenShift for hosting, and Elasticsearch for powering their search service. Some of the packages are still under evaluation/prototyping and so may not be finalized until into 2020.

More details on CERN's "Microsoft Alternatives" via the MALT table.