Solutions
Who Office Unbound
is being built for.
The same platform looks different from a ten-person firm, a managed service provider, an enterprise architecture team and a developer. These pages describe what each of them is likely to care about, and what Office Unbound intends to offer them.
Project status Office Unbound is in its first phase, architecture and evaluation. Every capability described in this section is planned or under evaluation; none is available to install.
One platform, several readers
The product is the same for everyone. The questions are not.
Office Unbound is being designed as a single open-source platform covering business email, documents, file storage and sync, team chat, meetings and calling, under one identity and one administration model. A business owner evaluating it wants to know whether staff will notice the change and what it will take to move. An MSP wants to know whether it can be turned into a service it can sell and support across many customers. An enterprise architect wants to know how identity, audit and recovery are designed. A privacy officer wants to know where data is and who can reach it.
Those are different conversations, so each has its own page. They describe the same planned capabilities from a different angle, and each is honest about the same thing: nothing has shipped yet, and the work of running a platform does not disappear because the software is open source. It moves to whoever operates it.
Find the page that fits
Most organizations will recognize themselves in one of these. Some — an MSP that is also privacy-focused, an enterprise with a large internal admin team — will want to read two.
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Small and midsize businesses
For organizations that use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace because it was the obvious choice, and now want more say over cost, hosting and the provider they depend on. The page covers what would feel the same to staff, what would change, the realistic ways a smaller business would run the platform — usually through a provider — and what a move would involve. Most useful to owners, operations leads and whoever “does the IT”.
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Managed service providers
For providers who resell someone else’s productivity platform today and want to deliver one they operate themselves. It covers multi-customer provisioning, tenant isolation, delegated administration, per-customer migration assessments, the planned provisioning API for platforms such as clientst0r, and how the commercial model changes when you run the service instead of reselling it. Most useful to MSP owners, service managers and lead engineers.
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Enterprise IT
For architecture and security teams who will evaluate the platform against criteria, not a feature list. It sets out the evaluation questions that matter — identity integration, governance, auditability, capacity and recovery planning, testing — and what evidence exists for each today, which in most cases is design intent rather than test results. Most useful to architects, CISOs, and infrastructure and platform teams.
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IT administrators
For the people who would run it every day. Rather than strategy, this page walks through ordinary administrative work — onboarding and offboarding, policies, mailbox and storage problems, updates, backups and scripted tasks — and how Office Unbound’s single administration layer is intended to handle each. Most useful to system administrators, helpdesk leads and MSP technicians.
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Privacy-focused organizations
For organizations that need to know where their data lives and who can reach it. It explains what self-hosting and data-location choice can give you, and is plain about the other half: when you take control of the infrastructure, you also take on responsibility for securing it. It makes no regulatory guarantees. Most useful to privacy officers, legal and compliance teams, and regulated professions.
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Developers and integrators
For people who want to build on, extend or contribute to the platform. It covers the open standards the platform is designed around, the planned management API, extension points, documentation and how security issues will be reported. The public repository has not been published yet; registered developers will be told when it is. Most useful to contributors, integrators and internal development teams.
If you have one question, start here
A shortcut for visitors who arrive with a specific concern rather than a role.
| Your question | Where it is answered |
|---|---|
| Will my staff be able to use it without retraining? | For businesses, then Email & calendar |
| Can I sell this as a managed service? | For managed service providers |
| How does it fit our identity provider and directory? | For enterprise IT, then Identity & administration |
| What does a normal week of running it look like? | For IT administrators |
| Does self-hosting make us compliant? | For privacy-focused organizations — short answer: not by itself |
| Can I read the code or integrate with it? | For developers & integrators |
| How do we get our existing data across? | Migration overview and Assessment & readiness |
| What will it cost? | Cost & licensing — what is and is not free, without invented figures |
True for every audience
Three things apply whichever page you read next.
It is early. The project is in Phase 1 — technology selection, licensing review, security architecture and migration discovery design. The solutions pages describe what is being designed and why; the roadmap shows the order in which it is expected to be built.
Someone has to operate it. Whether that is your own team, an MSP or, possibly in future, a managed hosting provider, the platform needs monitoring, backups, updates and security maintenance. The hosting page sets out who carries which responsibility in each model.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are good products. They are mature, capable and well supported. Office Unbound is for organizations that want a different arrangement — more control over where the platform runs, what it costs to license, when it changes and how easily they can leave — not for anyone who has been told their current platform is broken.
Not sure which of these you are?
Tell us about your organization and what you run today. Registrations help decide which workloads and deployment models are built and tested first.