Product · Platform overview
One platform for the work
a business does every day.
Email, documents, file storage and sync, team chat, meetings and calling, delivered under one identity, one interface and one administration layer — on infrastructure the organization chooses.
Project status Office Unbound is in its first phase, architecture and evaluation. The platform described here is the design objective; no part of it is available yet.
What the platform covers
The main business functions organizations buy today as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
Most organizations do not use “an office suite”. They use mail and calendars all day, edit documents and spreadsheets, keep files in shared folders that sync to laptops, talk in chat channels, join video calls and, increasingly, take phone calls through the same system. Behind all of it sits a directory of people and groups that decides who can open what.
Office Unbound is being designed to cover that whole set, not one corner of it. Each workload is built on an established open-source project that already does the job well — a mail server, an office editor, a file platform, a messaging system, a media server — and Office Unbound supplies what turns them into one product: shared identity, a consistent interface, central administration, multi-tenant provisioning and migration from the platforms organizations use today.
The distinction matters. Many open-source alternatives are a list of separate applications, each with its own login, its own user database, its own admin screen and its own update cycle. That is workable for a technical team and tiring for everyone else. The point of Office Unbound is that a user signs in once and an administrator manages one set of accounts, policies and logs.
The workloads
Six product areas, each with its own page describing intended capabilities, candidate technology and current status.
| Area | What it covers | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Email & calendar | Mailboxes, shared mailboxes, calendars, contacts, resource booking, Outlook-style webmail. | Planned |
| Documents | Word processing, spreadsheets and presentations edited together in the browser. | Planned |
| Files & sync | Personal and shared storage, versioning, sharing, a desktop client with offline access. | Planned |
| Chat & collaboration | Direct and group chat, channels and team workspaces on the Matrix standard. | Planned |
| Meetings & calling | Video meetings, screen sharing, SIP telephony with extensions, queues and voicemail. | Planned |
| Identity & administration | Single sign-on, MFA, directory, groups, roles, provisioning and the admin console. | Planned |
Cutting across all six: security and compliance controls and migration from Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
One identity, one interface, one administration
The three things Office Unbound adds on top of the components it builds on. They are also the hardest part of the project, and the part that decides whether it feels like one product.
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One identity
A single identity provider issues every sign-in, through OpenID Connect or SAML. Mail, documents, files, chat and meetings trust that provider instead of keeping their own passwords. MFA, session length and sign-in policy are set once and apply everywhere. Disabling an account ends access to every service, not just the one an administrator remembered.
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One interface
A shared navigation and visual language across the web applications, so moving from a message to the attached document to the team’s chat channel does not feel like switching vendors. Some components have mature interfaces of their own; the work is to integrate and theme them consistently, and to build the connecting pieces they lack.
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One administration
One console and one management API for users, groups, domains, quotas, policies, service assignment and audit logs. Underneath, each component keeps its own configuration; Office Unbound’s administration services translate one decision — “this person joins Finance” — into the right changes in each of them.
How the workloads connect
Integration is where a platform earns the word. These are the connections being designed, not features that exist.
- Mail and files
- Large attachments sent as share links to stored files, with expiry and access controlled by file-sharing policy, instead of copies multiplied across mailboxes.
- Files and documents
- Documents live in file storage and open in the browser editor from there. There is one copy, one permission model and one version history, whether the file is edited online or synced to a laptop.
- Calendar and meetings
- A meeting created in the calendar carries its own join link. Invitations go to internal and external attendees through ordinary calendar standards.
- Chat and files
- Files shared into a channel are stored in the team’s workspace with the channel’s membership as the permission, so they are still findable after the conversation scrolls away.
- Chat and meetings
- A call can start from a room, and a scheduled meeting can have a chat room that outlasts it.
- Directory and everything
- Groups drive mail distribution lists, shared folder access, channel membership and meeting permissions from one place, so access follows organizational structure.
- Administration and everything
- Quotas, retention, sharing rules and audit logging are set from the console and enforced by each service; logs are collected in one place for review.
What Office Unbound reuses
Mail transport and storage, document rendering, file synchronization, federated messaging and real-time media are hard problems that established open-source projects have spent years on. Rebuilding them would take longer and produce something less reliable. The candidates are being evaluated for protocol coverage, behavior at scale, multi-tenant support, upstream health and licensing.
- Mail and groupware servers
- Browser-based office editors
- File storage and desktop sync
- Matrix messaging and real-time media
- SIP telephony
- Identity and directory services
What Office Unbound builds
The parts those projects do not provide on their own, and which a business needs before it can run on them without a specialist for each component.
- Unified identity wiring and account lifecycle
- A consistent interface and navigation across services
- Central administration and a management API
- Multi-tenant provisioning for MSPs
- Migration assessment and migration tooling
- A branded desktop client experience
- Packaged deployment and customer-controlled updates
Platform-level capabilities
Capabilities that belong to the platform as a whole rather than to one workload.
- Available Available and verified in a release
- In development Being built now
- Planned In the roadmap, not yet started
- Under evaluation Being assessed; not yet selected
| Capability | What it means | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Single sign-on across services | One sign-in for mail, documents, files, chat and meetings through a shared identity provider. | Planned |
| Unified web interface | Shared navigation and consistent design across the browser applications. | Planned |
| Central administration console | Users, groups, domains, policies, quotas and service assignment managed in one place. | Planned |
| Management API | Programmatic access to the same administrative actions the console performs. | Planned |
| Multi-tenant provisioning | Separate customer organizations on shared infrastructure, for MSPs and larger groups. | Planned |
| Central audit logging | Administrative and security events from every service collected for review. | Planned |
| Desktop and mobile access | A branded desktop client for files, and mobile access to mail, files, chat and meetings. | Planned |
| Customer-controlled updates | Operators choose when updates are applied, with staging and rollback planning. | Planned |
| Migration tooling | Assessment and staged migration from Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. | Planned |
| Packaged deployment | Installation as separated Linux virtual machines, initially on Proxmox VE. | Initial target |
| Component selection | Choice of mail, office, file, messaging and media components. | In development |
Office Unbound is not claimed to match Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace feature for feature. Both are mature platforms with large ecosystems of add-ins, integrations, compliance tooling and device management that a new project will not reproduce. The goal is to cover the main business functions well, under an architecture the customer controls, and to say precisely where gaps remain.
Where it runs
Each workload is intended to run as its own set of services, deployed initially as Linux virtual machines on Proxmox VE. Separating workloads means mail can be patched without restarting the document editor, file storage can be given more disks without touching chat, and a fault in one service is less likely to take down the others. It also means operators need to plan storage, backups and capacity for each part, which the deployment documentation will have to cover honestly.
The same platform is meant to be run by an organization on its own hardware, on private or rented infrastructure, or by a managed service provider hosting many customers. Who is responsible for what changes with each model.
Evaluating alternatives to Microsoft 365?
Tell us which workloads you depend on and how you would want to host them. It helps decide what is built and tested first.