Following a detailed critique of the DINUM in 2024, the Court of Audit revisits the issue of digitizing government services with a new report titled “The Office and Collaborative Tools Within the State.”
The inquiry, triggered through the financial jurisdiction’s citizen-participation platform, covers the central administrations and the deconcentrated services of the eleven ministries, totaling about 861,000 computer workstations.
Four of them account for most of it: the Interior, the Armed Forces, the Economy and Finance, and Justice. The scope excludes local authorities, hospitals, social security bodies, and state operators.
The 850,000 teachers do not have government-managed computers: only 30,000 administrative workstations are accounted for within the Ministry of National Education.
A Mosaic Inherited from the Autonomy of the Ministries
Each ministry having long chosen its own tools, the Court identifies three situations.
The first, majority, involves installing the Microsoft Office suite on the servers or on the administration’s workstations. Some ministries, however, limit licenses: the Interior outfits only 10% of its workstations (excluding the gendarmerie), the Ecological Transition 40%.
The second rests on the Microsoft 365 cloud offering used by the social ministries, Culture, the DGAC, the DILA, and for the needs of NATO and the Armed Forces.
The third is the open-source software path. The National Gendarmerie has abandoned proprietary licenses in favor of LibreOffice, open-source mail, and GendBuntu, a Linux distribution deployed on 72,000 computers.
The DGFiP has generalized LibreOffice and Thunderbird since the late 2000s, together with internal collaborative platforms.
Microsoft 365: A General Ban in Principle, with Exceptions
According to the “Cloud at the Center” doctrine and the DINUM guidelines published in 2021, using Microsoft 365 is, in principle, prohibited within the administration. Data hosted there reside on servers subject to extraterritorial U.S. laws (CLOUD Act), and the service is not classified as SecNumCloud.
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister has approved temporary exemptions for the social ministries and the Culture Ministry, invoking cybersecurity and modernization.
Most of these services plan to move to the Bleu offering, backed by Capgemini and Orange on Microsoft technologies, as soon as it obtains SecNumCloud qualification.
The Court notes that this qualification, five years after the offer was announced, has still not been achieved.
A €100 Million Bill
In 2025, the State allocated €100 million to office software and collaborative tools, up from €67 million in 2021.
The budget breaks down as follows:
- €61 million for software licenses, of which 80% goes to Microsoft and to Bleu;
- €26 million for IT services;
- €13 million for internal payroll.
The average cost amounts to €87 per workstation per year. However, there are substantial disparities: €20 at the Interior thanks to the LibreOffice-based solution, versus €378 at Culture which has subscribed to Microsoft 365.
The magistrates on Rue Cambon estimate that broadening locally installed open-source software could save between €30 and €65 million per year.
In the cloud, a free/open-source suite certified SecNumCloud (roughly €100 per workstation per year) would avoid an additional annual cost of about €130 million compared with Microsoft 365 or Bleu (around €250).
“The Suite”: A Building Block, Not Yet a Substitute
Developed by the DINUM for a cumulative €39.6 million between 2021 and 2025, The Suite brings together services such as Tchap (368,000 active users by the end of 2025), Visio, France Transfert, Mail and Files.
The Court, which has previously not minced words about the software, notes that it does not replace, as it stands, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
The offering developed by the DINUM does not provide either on-premises applications or a spreadsheet and presentation package equivalent to Excel and PowerPoint. Its Docs and Grist modules address co-editing and lightweight data management needs.
The current strategy thus keeps this interministerial collaborative core alongside traditional office suites.
Four Recommendations to the Prime Minister
The Court sets a deadline of 2027 and presents four recommendations to the Prime Minister.
First, it calls for greater involvement of all ministries in shaping the roadmap and managing The Suite. It also advocates extending DINUM’s oversight to cover all of the State’s office and collaborative tools.
The magistrates also urge changing the development model of The Suite so that it relies more on companies within the open-source software ecosystem.
Finally, they recommend launching a three- to four-year multi-year plan to converge toward an open-source office and collaboration suite, hosted in a sovereign cloud, whether SecNumCloud-certified or internally hosted by the State.
