The grey period: making Teams and sovereign platforms talk to each other

Since this summer the European Commission has run Element Pro on its own infrastructure, while Microsoft Teams stays its main communication tool. On an internal message board seen by Politico, officials question whether the new tool can really stand in for Teams, and Element's CEO expects teething issues.

Two systems side by side, and people reaching for the one everyone else is on. That is not a Commission problem. The Dutch government is looking at Nextcloud for its own workplace and will meet the same thing. It is what every sovereign platform rollout looks like from the inside.

Nobody switches in a weekend, and most never fully switch

Departments adopt a new platform one at a time. Customers, suppliers and partners stay on Teams, because you don't get to plan their roadmap. Between the decision and the end state there is a stretch of months or years where both worlds have to work. For plenty of organisations that stretch never ends, because Teams is where their market is.

We call that the grey period. It is the part nobody budgets for and the part that decides whether the new platform gets used or quietly abandoned. If people can't reach each other the way they always did, they fall back on Teams. Not out of resistance, just to get their work done.

Two things break in the grey period, and the second one catches people out.

The calls between people

A colleague on Nextcloud Talk needs the department that hasn't moved. A supplier calls in from Teams. A customer schedules a video call and you're the only one not on the invite.

Our bridge lets a Teams user and someone on a sovereign platform make audio and video calls to each other as if they were on the same system. Both directions, and that second direction matters: it means Teams stays reachable for everyone who left it, and everyone still on Teams keeps reaching the people who moved.

We're building for the three European platforms that keep coming up. Nextcloud Talk, the calling and chat layer of the open-source platform many European workplaces already run on. Element, built on the open, federated Matrix protocol that several European governments already use. And Wire, end-to-end encrypted, developed with the Schwarz Group and hosted on its German STACKIT cloud.

The devices nobody planned for

This is the one that gets overlooked. Intercoms at the gate. Video door phones at reception. IP speakers for evacuation announcements. In thousands of buildings those are wired into Microsoft Teams, which means the receptionist takes the door call in the same client as everything else.

Add a second platform and that integration has nowhere to land for half your staff. Suddenly the question isn't "which platform do we pick", it's "who opens the gate on Monday".

We've spent years connecting intercoms, video door phones and IP speakers to Teams. CyberGate does that today for more than 1,500 organisations in 35 countries. We're now making those same devices reachable from Nextcloud Talk, Element and Wire as well, so your front door doesn't care which client the person on duty happens to use.

We saw the mirror image of this when organisations moved their phones to Teams. The devices nobody had planned for broke more projects than the phone numbers did. Adding a platform next to Teams has the same trap, pointed the other way.

A Microsoft ISV building a way out of Teams?

Worth being clear about, because the sovereignty debate gets loud and the nuance goes first.

We're a Microsoft ISV. Everything we've built for the last years makes Teams work better, and that doesn't change. What we're adding is a second thing: making Teams reachable from outside itself. Those are the same job seen from two sides. An organisation that runs Nextcloud and needs its people to reach Teams users is asking us to unlock Teams, not to replace it. The bridge opens Microsoft up to platforms that couldn't reach it before, and opens those platforms up to the hundreds of millions of people on Teams.

It also doesn't touch what makes your platform sovereign. Calls between two people on Nextcloud, Element or Wire stay on that platform and never pass through the bridge. Only calls with someone on Teams go through CyberGate, which runs in Microsoft Azure next to Teams, so those calls reach Microsoft's cloud the way they already did.

Sovereignty is about choice, and choice without interoperability isn't choice. It's a wall with your own logo on it.

Where this stands

The bridge is past the slide stage. We're building and testing it now, and we're looking for organisations to pilot it in a real environment with real users and real door phones.

If you're rolling out a sovereign platform, or weighing one up, we'd like to hear how it's set up and which calls and devices have to keep working while both worlds run side by side. That's the part we're good at.