France replaces Teams and Zoom with homegrown Visio for government use

France is moving civil servants off Microsoft Teams and Zoom onto a homegrown, MIT‑licensed open‑source videoconferencing platform called Visio. The Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) is deploying Visio now across ministries and state agencies, with full deployment targeted by 2027.

Visio was developed with help from the Netherlands and Germany and built using Django, React and LiveKit. It offers HD video, screen sharing and chat, includes AI‑powered transcription and speaker identification from French start‑up Pyannote, and integrates with secure messaging like Tchap on the Matrix protocol.

Officials say France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI helped harden encryption and meet national security requirements, and Visio has been tested for about a year with roughly 40,000 regular users and an expansion path to some 200,000 workers. The shift is part of Suite Numérique, a family of open‑source sovereign software programs intended to replace US services such as Gmail and Slack, and is explicitly tied to a broader doctrine of "digital sovereignty." Officials argue that relying on US‑hosted services exposes government discussions to foreign laws such as the 2018 US Cloud Act.

As David Amiel, minister‑delegate for the civil service and state reform, put it: France is committed "to regaining our digital independence.

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