Element Blog

A faster, rustier Element Web

Thibault Martin — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 07:50:16 GMT

Dave Baker and Florian Duros (Element) at The Matrix Conference 2026.

Element Web is moving onto the Matrix Rust SDK, the same foundation that powers Element X on mobile. Our team isn't doing it as one big rewrite. They're rebuilding the app one piece at a time as reusable shared components that don't care which SDK sits underneath. At The Matrix Conference 2026, Dave Baker and Florian Duros showed how far that work has gotten since FOSDEM 2026, and how it has already improved in the Element Web people use today.

Dave is a staff software engineer at Element and also sits on the Matrix Spec Core Team. Florian is a senior software engineer at Element. He and Florian work together on Element Web.

How Element Web got here

Dave started with history. Element Web began in 2015 as Vector (later Riot), and he showed a screenshot of a very early 2016 version: very simple, and very fast. The client grew alongside the Matrix spec, which was much simpler back then, and features were added as the protocol grew.

From the start, the team wanted to build the client from reusable parts. That was the idea behind the Matrix React SDK: a library of React components you could compose into a different app, with Element as a thin skin on top. In practice it didn't work out. The components held all their own logic and were tightly coupled to the app and to each other, so lifting one into another app was hard. In Dave's words, the name "was misleading: it wasn't really an SDK". The team retired it in 2024 and merged it into Element Web.

Why not just rewrite Element Web on the Rust SDK?

Element X, Element's newer mobile client, is built entirely on the Matrix Rust SDK. Dave listed what that brings: it was designed from the ground up to be fast and stable, it has supported end-to-end encryption from day one (the older React and JS SDKs predate end-to-end encryption), and it's built around Sliding Sync to make the app usable immediately after it was started. Android and iOS share that same Rust SDK, so there's more code reuse. Having web on it too would be great.

A straight rewrite of Element Web has real problems, though. Moving from the Element Classic mobile apps to Element X took multiple years, and Element Web has even more features than those apps did. A new app would also mean migrating users, or making administrators switch web clients for them, and running two clients in parallel the whole time.

Dave went through the alternatives and why the team rejected them:

Freeze new features until the rewrite is done. Not realistic: customers won't accept waiting for features until a migration finishes.
Build every feature twice, once for each client. That means maintaining two clients for the whole migration.
Speed things up with LLMs. The team wants all their code reviewed by humans to keep a high quality bar.

There's also the team's direct experience. Element Web already uses Rust for encryption, via the Rust crypto library compiled into the app. That migration alone took over two years and was, as Dave put it, "at least five times" more complicated than you'd expect.

The underlying problem is that Element Web is tightly tied to the JavaScript SDK it's written against, with little separation between the two. The goal is to keep the app's UI and swap the SDK beneath it.

Shared components and the MVVM pattern

Florian explained how shared components solve this. They live in a separate package with no technical coupling to Element Web, and therefore none to the JS SDK. They're also bigger than the basic building blocks in Compound, Element's existing design system. Florian's example was a full room picker dialog that a module could reuse.

The components follow MVVM (model–view–view model), the pattern Element already uses in its mobile apps:

The model is the data layer, in this case the SDK.
The view is the UI component, with no business logic.
The view model connects the two and acts as an abstraction layer between the view and the SDK.

Views live in shared components. To switch SDKs, you write a new view model and leave the UI alone. That way work such as accessibility improvements carries straight over. Florian said the switch should be close to "plug and play" for developers.

The team also added new tooling along the way. Every shared component has a Storybook entry with screenshot tests for each state, which cuts down on visual regressions and speeds up development.

What's already shipping in Element Web

Several recent Element Web features are built this way:

A completely rewritten timeline, now in labs. Florian said it no longer has jumping issues and is more reliable, though it's still in development.
User status.
Sections at the top of the room list.
New link previews.

Existing parts of the app are being moved over too, including the EventTile component that renders timeline items, which Florian called a huge piece of work. The user menu, room list and emoji picker have also moved. The team's rule is that when they work on an existing feature, they take the time to move it into shared components.

The demo: Storybook and Aurora

Florian showed the Storybook setup. The room list appears in every state (flat list, sections, loading, empty), and you can drill down to a single room list item. He then showed the same components running in Element Web and in Aurora, a proof-of-concept client built on the Rust SDK. The timeline was the same component in both.

Dave explained why Storybook matters to the team. It holds every component in the app and doubles as a test suite. For the user menu, for example, there are preset states with very long names, so the team can check that truncation with an ellipsis works without starting the whole app. Developers can also change a component and see the result straight away without logging into Element Web.

He described Aurora as a test bed with "a much lower bar on code quality", built as a hackathon project and updated from his own LLM-driven pull requests. It is not ready for production, which he reminded us of as a click on a room filter failed to respond live on stage! The point is that its components come straight from Element Web, so Aurora gets those features just by importing them.

Questions from the audience

What happens when the components are done? Dave said the team is still deciding. One option is a toggle between JS SDK and Rust SDK modes, possibly requiring a log out and back in. The downside is shipping the Rust SDK to everyone, including people who don't use it. Another is a build flag that produces Element Web in either mode, which Dave thought might be more sensible. Either way, only one SDK can run at a time. Once one SDK syncs, the server treats those events as delivered, so the other SDK would never receive them.

Can I use these components in my own projects? Yes. They're in the Element Web monorepo, alongside the web app and shared utilities. Dave said this finally delivers what the React SDK was meant to do: take a component like the room list, write a view model for it, drop it into a React app and build your own chat client.

Has the JS SDK changed to make the move easier? Not much. Dave explained that one approach would be to make the JS SDK look more like the Rust SDK and swap the bottom layer. The team chose to work at the higher level and swap the top layer instead. Florian added that the two SDKs have different architectures and paradigms, so writing a new view model per SDK is easier than forcing their APIs to match.

How far along is the project? Not all components have been converted yet, and the work has mostly happened in the background, whenever the team touches a feature. Speeding it up is a question of priorities. The next big milestone is actually putting the Rust SDK into Element Web.

Learn more

The shared components are available now in the Element Web monorepo for anyone who wants to build with them. For the full demo, watch the talk on YouTube.

Operator, I need an exit from Big Tech calls

Steve Loynes — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:04:19 GMT

MatrixRTC has landed and Element Call takes off!

All good things come to those who wait! MatrixRTC is finally here: the world’s first decentralised, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), multiparty VoIP protocol.

For messaging, decentralisation is a strength. Messages get through even when servers drop offline or networks split, and everything syncs when they reconnect. Voice and video also need low latency, though: a word that arrives two seconds late is no use to anyone.

Decentralised VoIP is hard enough. Making it E2EE, multiparty and scalable has been a long and winding road. For group calling we’ve been through FreeSWITCH, Jitsi, peer-to-peer mesh (Third Room and the original Element Call) and waterfall SFUs. We’ve arrived at MatrixRTC, the hardest and final piece of Matrix 2.0 jigsaw - and now we’re talking!

We have fast, smooth and reliable voice and video, and we’ve built it into the protocol as MatrixRTC. Despite all the complexity underneath, it’s E2EE by default, self-hostable, and easy to deploy and use.

So you can finally hang up on Big Tech calls.

Here’s how it works:

MatrixRTC is an open standard for coordinating multiparty, encrypted VoIP across Matrix.
Each Matrix server can run its own conferencing server (a selective forwarding unit, or SFU).
Your server needs an SFU if you want to start calls.
Users send their audio and video to their own server’s SFU. If it doesn’t have one, they use another participant’s.
- Because you don’t need your own SFU to join a call, it’s simpler to roll out across the network.
- Calls can also be pinned to a chosen set of SFUs to reduce points of failure, instead of always being spread across every participating server.
Users receive audio and video directly from the SFU where it’s being published.
It supports multiple users per call, and multiple devices per user.

True to the Matrix open standard and the sovereignty it delivers, MatrixRTC isn’t tied to any particular VoIP technology. Element Call currently uses LiveKit, but that choice isn't forced in the protocol: you could use other transports too.

Client C has no local SFU, so it publishes to SFU A. Every client subscribes to every SFU carrying a participant it wants to receive.

MatrixRTC may have been built by Element, but it’s very much an open standard. connect2x has implemented it independently in Tammy, and at the Matrix Conference we’re demoing Element Call and Tammy calling each other: cross-vendor interoperable calling through the Matrix open standard!

Element Call rings the changes

Element Call, the calling function within Element, delivers sovereign, E2EE voice and video, running over a federated network with no single point of failure.

With MatrixRTC finalised, Element Call is getting some big, exciting changes.

At launch, Element Call is the same in ESS Community and ESS Pro. The only difference is that calling supports up to around 50 participants when powered by ESS Community and other Synapse deployments, while ESS Pro’s advanced Synapse Pro architecture takes that to around 200. Over time, ESS Pro will make additional enterprise features available for workplace use (see below).

Element Desktop & Web

We’re merging Element Call directly into Element Desktop & Web, and the standalone single-page app at call.element.io will eventually be retired.

Calls will now be E2EE using your real Matrix identity, not the basic shared-key encryption the standalone app relied on. Link-based calling also comes straight into Element Web, with all-new guest access. You can invite people into your own Matrix deployment, rather than onto a throwaway account on an unfederated homeserver, which makes it ideal for scheduled meetings.

Because Element Call is now built into Element Desktop & Web natively, not loaded as a widget, calls get better performance and security. You can also finally pop calls out into their own windows. On top of that, you can juggle multiple calls, share your screen with audio (on some platforms, at least), and, at last, chat during your calls.

The standalone Element Call app will stay around for a while and can still be used as a widget, but we don’t plan to support it indefinitely.

Element Mobile

We’re replacing Element Call entirely with native MatrixRTC support, which finally brings fully native multiparty voice and video calling to iOS and Android. You no longer have to wait for an embedded web browser to spin up, and calls are no longer limited by what that browser can do.

Audio routing works properly, picture-in-picture is seamless, and accessibility is built in from the start. Calls now look and feel like the rest of the app, with no mismatch between Element Call’s web interface and the native UI. Going native also makes it easy to support the latest hardware features, such as the multiple cameras and screens on the iPhone Duo.

A Rust SDK in every app

Both platforms are converging on matrix-rust-rtc, a new Rust SDK that handles the MatrixRTC lifecycle and signalling as a separate crate, much as matrix-sdk-crypto handles E2EE. Element X already uses the new stack, and Element Web is in the process of switching over from matrix-js-sdk. Keeping all our MatrixRTC signalling logic in one place, with a flagship implementation, will make calls much more reliable, just as matrix-sdk-crypto has done for E2EE.

Features, features, everywhere

This unlocks a wave of new Element Call features, which we’re previewing at the Matrix Conference. They’ll land over the coming weeks and months. The code isn’t released yet, because there’s a lot of it including:

Background replacement
Audio levels
Funky new layouts that let you zoom, drag and drop (everyone loved this from the earliest builds of EC, and it’s back!)
Floor control features that let you configure and moderate who can do what in the room

Flexible layouts

Audio levels and background replacement

Features that empower end users - such as secure voice, video and moderation - are always open source. Features that serve organisations over individual users go into ESS Pro and Element Pro. Here, this means that we’re putting the features which undermine E2EE (by doing server-side actions like recording, transcription, and SIP interoperability) into ESS Pro and Element Pro.

Call recording
Call captions
Call transcriptions
SIP dial-in and calling

So how can I use this?

For personal use and small teams, the obvious option is ESS Community. It’s our official Matrix distribution, is free of charge, and should comfortably support up to around 50 calling participants depending on your exact set up.

If you’re a government or large public sector organisation, get in touch about a fully supported ESS Pro deployment. For all sorts of reasons - not least compliance - these types of organisations really shouldn’t be using community software. Also, please make sure you’re not paying a service provider that is free riding on Matrix.

The future

It’s goodbye to separate Element Call links, and hello to calling built right into the app.

We’re also already exploring alternatives to LiveKit as a MatrixRTC transport. We love LiveKit, but the whole point of Matrix is to be a vendor-neutral open standard, so we take choice seriously.

We’ve been working on an exciting new approach, codenamed cSFU. It uses an entirely new VoIP stack and SFU (not even WebRTC!) to deliver much better performance on poor networks, better scalability, and simpler but stronger encryption. We’ll share more soon. In the meantime, here’s a quick demo of more MatrixRTC interoperability, this time over cSFU between Element Call and DINUM’s Visio.

Will this replace the phone network? Who knows, maybe! It’s an enormous leap forward for both Matrix and Element, and we can’t wait to see where it goes.

“Matrix, come here.” The world’s first cross-border government federation demo

Thibault Martin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:04:33 GMT

“Matrix, come here.” The world’s first cross-border government federation demo

October 21, 2026

Government

On 10 March 1876, in a Boston laboratory, Alexander Graham Bell spoke into his new instrument: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." Thomas Watson, in the next room, heard every word. Two people, separated by a wall, had spoken through a wire for the first time, and the world's communications have never been the same.

On 21 October 2026, in a Malmö hotel, we saw a similar breakthrough demonstration. This time, the walls were national borders, and in place of the wire was the Matrix open standard. And instead of Bell and Watson, it was:

Person	Organisation	Demo environment
Mathieu Velten	DINUMthe French government’s digitalisation agency	Tchappart of LaSuite, built on community Synapse
Jeroen Franssen	NATOAllied Command Transformation	FluffyChat and ESS Pro
Fabien Marathée	European Commission	Element and ESS Pro
Kenneth Edwall	FörsäkringskassanSweden’s Social Insurance Agency	SAFOS Chatton ESS Classic
Sven Thomsen	Schleswig-Holstein	Element on ESS Pro

Five public sector organisations, five sovereign run deployments, one conversation, spanning three countries and two international institutions. The live demo was a proof point of what governments can do with the Matrix open standard.

DINUM, NATO and Försäkringskassan each carry their own name and branding, and each is run by its own organisation on its own infrastructure. France develops Tchap in-house from open source code. NATO with NI²CE Messenger (Fluffy Chat in the demo environment), and Försäkringskassan with SAFOS Chat, have built their own versions of the Element app, and the others run Element as it comes. What they share isn't a supplier but a standard, and much of the open source code beneath them started life at Element, the company whose founders created Matrix.

Today, they ran a proof of concept of federation between all of them, in demo environments hosted on the same infrastructure as their actual deployments.

The importance of an open standard

Matrix was conceived as the "missing communications layer of the web." Real-time messaging and VoIP running over a decentralised architecture. As with the original internet, decentralisation makes the network highly resilient. It also lets each party host its own server, which keeps it sovereign. In an era of sharpened geopolitics, that combination of sovereignty and resilience is crucial, and so is the end-to-end encryption Matrix provides.

To each their own stack

Every organisation is running its own stack. Some rely on a vendor, some develop their own solutions. Some are open, and some are locked down. But every one of them can talk to the others.

Deployment	Backend	Network filtering	Enterprise control
DINUM	Developed in-house from community Synapse	IP based	Secure Border Gateway developed in-house
European Commission	ESS Pro	Open	None
NATO	ESS Pro	Open	None
Försäkringskassan	ESS Classic	IP based + geo block	Only accessible to MDM enrolled devices File transfer blocked
Schleswig-Holstein	ESS Pro	Open	None

One government, many conversations

Government communication is rarely a single organisation talking to itself. A ministry coordinates with its agencies. Agencies work with regional and local authorities. Emergency services, health bodies and the armed forces all need to reach one another, often at short notice. Beyond national borders, the same is true between allies, EU institutions and international partners.

Today the majority of that traffic still runs over vendor-controlled solutions, ‘walled garden’ platforms and consumer-grade apps. When a crisis strikes, people reach for whatever works, rather than whatever is secure, sovereign and accountable.

The answer isn't to put every department, region and country on the same product from the same supplier. That simply swaps many silos for one dependency. Government communication at this scale needs technology that is vendor-agnostic and sovereignty-preserving, so each organisation can choose what suits it and keep control of its own stack, data and infrastructure.

Sweden has already shown what this looks like. In May 2026, Försäkringskassan and Trafikverket federated as a part of Sweden’s dSam initiative. The two agencies use different Matrix-based products from different vendors, and they talk to each other seamlessly. The Malmö demo took the same principle across borders.

cross-border governmentSHNATOSBGDINUMFKECHomeserverSecure Border Gateway

Choice by design: an ecosystem of more than 70 providers

Because Matrix is an open standard, no single company owns or controls it. More than 70 providers now compete across the Matrix ecosystem, offering clients, servers, hosting, integration and support. That gives governments, defence organisations and the public sector a genuine choice between interoperable suppliers, and real protection against vendor lock-in.

If a provider no longer meets an organisation's needs, it can move to another without abandoning its users, its history or its connections to partners. Everyone still speaks the same protocol.

Matrix's open source foundations go one step further. Any organisation can choose to take its deployment in-house, running and maintaining the software itself, whether for reasons of policy, security or cost. That option alone changes the relationship with suppliers: vendors have to keep earning the business, because the customer is never trapped.

200M+
people using Matrix-based communications globally
35+
governments with deployed Matrix-based sovereign systems
40+
competitive vendors in the Matrix ecosystem
30+
service providers and hosters offering Matrix-based solutions

Federation on government terms

Federation doesn't mean open to everyone. For official government communication, Matrix deployments typically run as private, or closed, federations. Only servers that have been explicitly approved can connect, and nothing is exposed to the public Matrix network. France's Tchap, Germany's TI-Messenger initiative all work this way.

When a private federation does open a door to a trusted partner, it can do so with precision. A secure border gateway sits at the edge of a deployment and acts as a checkpoint for federation traffic, enforcing policy on which external servers are allowed to connect.

This gives each organisation layered control:

Who: only named, trusted servers and organisations can federate.
What: policies decide which conversations, content and features can cross the border.
How: messages stay end-to-end encrypted, and each party keeps its own data, logs and audit trail on its own infrastructure.

That's the model the Malmö demo put on show: independently run, sovereign deployments that keep their borders, while choosing exactly who they open them to.

European public sector communications that support Matrix open standard federation

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Matrix Conference kicks off tomorrow: governments, choice and sovereignty

Steve Loynes — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:04:07 GMT

Matrix Conference kicks off tomorrow: governments, choice and sovereignty

October 20, 2026

Government

The Matrix Conference gets going in earnest tomorrow in Malmö, and even just a quick glance at the programme says a lot about where Matrix is heading. Governments and public sector organisations from more than 15 countries are taking part, along with intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) including the European Commission, NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC).

The truly revealing part being that they aren't coming to learn about the Matrix open standard, but to explain how they are already using it.

Government is building on Matrix, in Europe and beyond

Europe is leading the way. Speakers include:

Sweden: the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan) and eSam, Sweden's public-sector collaboration programme
France: Tchap, the French government's messaging service
Germany: FITKO, the Federal IT Cooperation body, gematik, the national digital health agency, and BWI, the IT arm of the German Armed Forces
The Netherlands: the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations
The EU: the European Commission

The momentum is global too, with delegates attending who run major Matrix deployments for their governments in Brazil, the US and Canada.

The highlight for many will be a world first live demo on Wednesday. Building on Sweden's Matrix-based federation, it shows separate governments and intergovernmental organisations collaborating across borders. Each runs its own infrastructure, and all of them talk to each other. More of that on Wednesday…

No choice, no sovereignty

A 'sovereign' platform from a single vendor just swaps one dependency for another.

Genuine sovereignty means governments being able to choose their tech, and being able to subsequently change that tech with minimal hassle. That is why Matrix exists. As an open standard, its whole purpose is interoperability: any compliant deployment, from any vendor, can talk to any other. Organisations keep control of their own infrastructure without cutting themselves off from everyone else.

So it's great to see so many providers of Matrix-based solutions at the conference this year, including adesso, Arawa, BWI, CompuGroup Medical (CGM), connect2x, Famedly, Labrys, Meedio, Nordeck, RISE, Rocket.Chat and Thales (Ercom). A competitive market is a sign of a healthy standard, and it gives buyers the choice upon which sovereignty depends.

Element and ESS Pro: delivering for governments

Our flagship product, Element Server Suite Pro (ESS Pro), is now used by 10 European governments, as well as Australia, Canada and the US and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) including the European Commission, NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC). Many more governments we work with will move to ESS Pro during 2027. As governments adjust to a changing geopolitical climate, ESS Pro gives them a jump start on sovereign communications.

ESS Pro is driving sovereign innovation in four areas.

Public administration

Matrix is emerging as the communications layer of Europe's sovereign workplace.

France: we work with DINUM on Tchap, its Matrix-based messenger and part of La Suite, which now has around 600,000 registered public servants. Arawa is using ESS Pro, with Adullact and Déclic, to bring a similar model to France's local authorities.
Germany: openDesk and Open Productivity both run ESS Pro, as does FITKO for ZaPuK, its government-to-citizen communications service.
Sweden: we also work closely with Försäkringskassan. It was great to see eSam, Försäkringskassan and Trafikverket demonstrate federation, with solutions from Element and Rocket.Chat working together over Matrix.

Across Europe, governments are building their own sovereign digital workplaces, and they're choosing Matrix to connect them. And they are increasingly realising the value of ESS Pro as a high performance, government-ready platform that delivers compliance (ISO 27001 for IT Grundschutz, ISO 5230, CE+, WCAG 2.1 AA) long-term support versions (LTS), enterprise features, regular updates and continual alignment with each evolution of the Matrix protocol.

Air-gapped deployments

After years of SaaS-first development, many organisations are now upgrading their air-gapped environments in response to geopolitics. Some are replacing end-of-life systems such as Skype for Business and Jabber, while others are migrating for the sovereignty of a Matrix-based solution.

Every ESS Pro release now ships with a dedicated air-gapped bundle, tested in our own automated pipeline. Operators can deploy and update without ever touching the internet, backed by long-term support releases and SLAs. With our partner 4Secure, we're also delivering Cross Domain Gateways that move information between high-side and low-side environments under strict policy control.

Mission Partner Environments

In a Mission Partner Environment (MPE), allies need to share information securely without handing control to any one nation. Matrix fits this perfectly. Each partner runs their own sovereign deployment, from any Matrix vendor, yet they can all still federate with each other.

ESS Pro is used by several armed forces. It sits at the heart of the mission partner environment for Olympus Fires, a joint forces exercise. In ESS Pro, we've added capabilities such as policy enforcement and classification labelling to support MPEs. We partner with specialists including Virtru, Cord3 and Veilant, as well as integrators including IBM SiXworks, Everforth ECS, General Dynamics, Leidos and Raytheon.

TI-Messenger

Germany's TI-Messenger is one of the most ambitious Matrix projects anywhere. It aims for a nationwide federation that will eventually connect the country's 150,000 healthcare organisations and most of its citizens.

T-Systems built Telekom TI-Messenger on ESS Pro for BARMER, one of Germany's largest health insurers. This year CompuGroup Medical, whose certified CGM TI-Messenger serves healthcare providers, also partnered with us to build on ESS Pro.

The next wave is the hardest: hundreds of thousands of pharmacies and local clinics, each needing its own secure server. ESS Pro's multi-tenancy lets providers host up to 50 of them on a single shard, cutting resource use by close to 90%. That makes it cost-effective to bring every corner of German healthcare onto Matrix, and we’re delighted to see T-Systems and CGM create offerings for that marketplace based on ESS Pro.

See you in Malmö

Governments are building on Matrix, a competitive ecosystem is giving them real choice, and ESS Pro is helping achieve sovereignty faster. If you're joining us at the conference, come and find the Element team for a chat, a geek out and a cold beer/hot coffee (*delete as applicable).

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Vendors behind openDesk join forces as Open Productivity

Steve Loynes — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 06:54:49 GMT

Six of the vendors behind openDesk, including Element, have formed Open Productivity: a joint venture that brings the sovereign digital workplace to businesses and critical infrastructure operators.

openDesk was created for German public administration. It brings together established open source applications for documents, email, calendars, file sharing, knowledge management and secure real-time communications into a single sovereign workplace suite.

Open Productivity Software GmbH, founded by Collabora Productivity, Element, Nordeck, Open-Xchange, Univention and XWiki, supports the rollout and implementation of openDesk, with the experience of six of its vendors and a network of partners to deploy and run it.

Together with ZenDiS

Open Productivity works in coordination with ZenDiS, the Center for Digital Sovereignty in Public Administration, which leads openDesk. ZenDiS continues to focus on public administration. Open Productivity complements it by giving businesses and organisations a way to work with most of the open source vendors behind openDesk.

We welcome the initiative of several openDesk vendors to support openDesk's path into the enterprise market through Open Productivity. Open Productivity enables the distributors and systems integrators that ZenDiS is now addressing with its new partner program.

Pamela Krosta-Hartl, Managing Director, ZenDiS

Element's part in Open Productivity

Element is a founding shareholder in Open Productivity. We provide openDesk's secure, real-time communications: messaging and calling built on Matrix, the open standard for federated communications.

Federation matters for the organisations Open Productivity serves. Critical infrastructure operators work with suppliers, regulators and partners every day. Matrix lets each of them run its own server and stay in control of its own data, while still communicating securely with the others.

openDesk runs Element Server Suite directly from us as the upstream vendor. That means the same ESS we build and ship ourselves, including hardened Kubernetes deployments, modern OIDC authentication and Element Call. Open Productivity customers get openDesk's communications straight from the people who make it.

openDesk has shown what a sovereign digital workplace looks like in public administration. Open Productivity brings it to businesses and critical infrastructure, with the vendors standing directly behind it. For Element, it means more organisations can communicate securely on Matrix, on their own terms.

Dr. Patrick Alberts, Chief Product Officer, Element, and Managing Director, Element Software GmbH

How Open Productivity supports rollout and operations

Through their partner network, each customer project gets a single point of contact, who handles consulting, migration, integration, deployment and ongoing operations. Customers can run openDesk on their own infrastructure or in the cloud.

Three launch partners bring that capability from day one:

Adfinis, an open source specialist headquartered in Switzerland, integrates and operates open source infrastructure.
The msg group adds industry expertise and systems integration, including experience with critical infrastructure operators.
Smile, a French open source specialist, brings integration experience and a presence in multiple European markets.

About Open Productivity

Open Productivity Software GmbH is a joint venture founded by Collabora Productivity, Element, Nordeck, Open-Xchange, Univention and XWiki. It is led by Managing Director Dr Gerald Pfeifer, formerly CTO for EMEA at SUSE and chair of the openSUSE project from 2019 to 2026.

Businesses need more than strong individual applications. They need to be able to deploy and reliably operate a complete digital workplace.

Dr. Gerald Pfeifer, Managing Director, Open Productivity

Element Blog

A faster, rustier Element Web

How Element Web got here

Why not just rewrite Element Web on the Rust SDK?

Shared components and the MVVM pattern

What's already shipping in Element Web

The demo: Storybook and Aurora

Questions from the audience

Learn more

Operator, I need an exit from Big Tech calls

Here’s how it works:

Element Call rings the changes

Features, features, everywhere

“Matrix, come here.” The world’s first cross-border government federation demo

“Matrix, come here.” The world’s first cross-border government federation demo

The importance of an open standard

To each their own stack

One government, many conversations

Choice by design: an ecosystem of more than 70 providers

Federation on government terms

European public sector communications that support Matrix open standard federation

Related Posts

By the same author

Be in your element.

Matrix Conference kicks off tomorrow: governments, choice and sovereignty

Matrix Conference kicks off tomorrow: governments, choice and sovereignty

Government is building on Matrix, in Europe and beyond

No choice, no sovereignty

Element and ESS Pro: delivering for governments

Public administration

Air-gapped deployments

Mission Partner Environments

TI-Messenger

See you in Malmö

Related Posts

By the same author

Be in your element.

Vendors behind openDesk join forces as Open Productivity

Together with ZenDiS

Element's part in Open Productivity

How Open Productivity supports rollout and operations

About Open Productivity