Solutions · Small and midsize businesses
Familiar tools for your staff.
More choice for the business.
Office Unbound is intended to give small and midsize businesses the email, documents, files, chat and meetings they use today, with a real choice about who runs them, where, and on what terms.
Project status Office Unbound is in its architecture and evaluation phase. There is nothing to sign up for or install yet; this page describes what is being designed for businesses like yours.
Why a business might look elsewhere
Usually not because the current platform has failed.
Most small and midsize businesses chose Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace because it was the sensible default. It came with the domain, the accountant used it, the last IT provider set it up. For many businesses it remains the right choice, and nothing on this page argues otherwise.
What changes over time is the relationship. Per-user prices and bundle contents are set by the vendor and revised at renewal. Features arrive, move and are retired on the vendor’s timetable. The business’s mail, files and identities all live in one provider’s account model, and moving any of it is a project. None of that is unreasonable for a global cloud service, but it leaves the business with very little say.
Office Unbound is being built for businesses that want that say back: the same everyday tools, run on infrastructure the business or its provider chooses, with open-source software that does not stop working when a subscription lapses, and data that can be exported and moved to another operator.
What your staff would notice — and what they wouldn’t
The goal is that a move changes the business arrangement far more than it changes anyone’s working day. That is a design objective; how close the result comes will only be known once the services are built and tested.
| Everyday task | What is intended to stay familiar | What may be different |
|---|---|---|
| Reading and sending email | Your own domain and addresses, folders, shared mailboxes such as accounts@, a web client laid out like Outlook, mail on phones. | Whether the Outlook desktop application connects is under evaluation; standards-based clients are the safer expectation. |
| Calendars and booking | Personal and shared calendars, invitations, free/busy lookup, meeting rooms. | Invitations exchanged with Microsoft and Google users rely on standard calendar formats, which cover the common cases rather than every feature. |
| Documents and spreadsheets | Opening, editing and sharing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in the browser, with several people editing at once. | Complex formatting, macros and some specialized Office features may not behave identically. |
| Shared files | Personal and shared folders, a desktop client that keeps files in sync, offline access to synced files, sharing links. | The desktop client is planned, not built. Offline work covers files on the device, not every online workflow. |
| Chat and meetings | Direct and group chat, channels, video meetings and screen sharing from the same sign-in. | Teams has many features and integrations; full parity is not claimed. |
| Signing in | One account for every service, with multifactor authentication. | Passwords and MFA cannot be copied from Microsoft or Google; staff enroll again during migration. |
Who would run it for you
A small business rarely wants to run its own mail server, and does not have to. Office Unbound is designed for several operating models, and for a business without its own IT staff the realistic answer is usually the second one.
Your own hardware
On a server in your office or a rack you rent. The most control, and all the responsibility: hardware, backups, monitoring, security updates, and what happens when the power fails. Realistic for businesses with in-house IT staff.
PlannedThrough your IT provider
An MSP hosts and administers the platform for you, often alongside the support it already provides. You keep ownership of your data and the right to export it; the provider carries the day-to-day operations.
PlannedManaged hosting
A possible future commercial service through approved providers. It is not offered today, and there are no terms or prices to describe.
Under evaluationStay where you are
A perfectly reasonable outcome of an assessment. If the move would cost more effort than it saves, or depends on features Office Unbound does not have, staying is the right call.
Hosting and deployment options, and who is responsible for what
What it would cost to run
No prices exist yet, and none are invented here.
Open-source software can be used without a per-user license fee, but a business platform is never free to operate. When a business compares its current subscription with Office Unbound, it is comparing one bundled number against several separate ones:
- Hosting and infrastructure
- Servers or virtual machines, storage, network bandwidth — owned, rented, or included in a provider’s service.
- Backup
- Off-site copies of mail and files, and the time to test that they can be restored.
- Administration and support
- Your own staff’s time, or an MSP’s managed service fee.
- Optional components
- Some candidate components have commercial editions or support arrangements; optional email security services and telephony carrier charges are separate.
- Migration
- A one-off project: assessment, transfer, verification and helping staff through the change.
The aim is to give businesses an alternative to mandatory bundled subscriptions where licensing and operating costs allow. It will not always be cheaper, and the cost and licensing page explains why without savings figures we cannot support.
What a move would look like
Planned. The migration tools are expected after the core services exist.
An assessment, before any commitment
The planned assessment engine connects to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace with authorized, least-privilege access and reports what you have: users, mailboxes, storage, shared files, and what will move cleanly, need conversion or not move at all.
A plan you can read
Estimated transfer volumes and time with their assumptions stated, the DNS changes needed, and anything that needs a decision — Gmail labels, for example, which do not map exactly to folders.
A small pilot
A few people move first and work normally for a while, so problems surface with them rather than with the whole business.
Staged transfer and cutover
Mail, calendars, contacts and files move in batches, recent changes are synchronized, and mail delivery switches over when the content has been checked.
Old system kept until you are sure
The source platform stays available until the migration is verified and you agree to decommission it.
Is it a fit?
Likely worth evaluating if
- You want your data and identities to be portable between providers.
- You already work with an IT provider who could host it.
- Your use of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace is mostly mail, calendars, documents, files and meetings.
- You want a say in when updates change the tools your staff use.
Probably not yet if
- You need something you can deploy this year — nothing is released.
- Your workflows depend on Power Platform, Teams apps or Google add-ons.
- Your spreadsheets rely heavily on VBA macros or Office-only features.
- No one, internal or external, is available to operate a platform.
Office Unbound is not claiming full compatibility with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, guaranteed savings, or that self-hosting is simpler than a cloud subscription. Running your own platform, or having a provider run it, is a different arrangement with different work involved.
Thinking about a change?
Tell us how many people you have, what you use today and who looks after your IT. It helps decide which workloads and migration paths are tested first.