Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

If your All Chats list has grown to the point where finding anything feels like work, you're not alone. A long, flat list of rooms and DMs doesn't scale — the important conversations get buried, the noise is always visible, and keeping on top of it all requires more effort than it should. Introducing sections!

Interoperability is the foundation of digital sovereignty; it’s the key ingredient in making sure the end-user stays in control, rather than the vendor. In reality, of course, most vendors want to be the one with the power. Vendors aim to lock their users in, and to build a proprietary walled garden as quickly as possible. This is why WhatsApp users can only message other WhatsApp users. Likewise, it’s Teams to Teams, Slack to Slack, Wire to Wire, Signal to Signal, Zoom to Zoom.

On 17 June Germany’s federal government and 16 Länder (states), led by The IT Planning Council, confirmed that ZaPuK will be a cornerstone of Germany’s Deutschland-Stack. The Deutschland-Stack (D-Stack) is Germany’s national sovereign technology platform designed to serve as a uniform, cross-governmental IT architecture.

We're pleased that Element has been recognised as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a multi-stakeholder initiative endorsed by the United Nations. To qualify as a Digital Public Good (DPG) a solution must meet a rigorous set of criteria. In particular open licensing, clear ownership, platform independence, strong documentation, privacy compliance and adherence to open standards.

Healthcare has always had its share of chronic conditions, but not all of them are clinical. For years healthcare communications have been trapped in paper-based systems, slow email chains and endless telephone tag. More worrying still, the creeping adoption of consumer-grade chat apps is now putting private patient data directly into Big Tech's hands - whose entire business models depend on harvesting it. Now there’s a prescription for change.

In a landmark demonstration of the power of the Matrix open standard, two of Sweden's major public sector agencies, Försäkringskassan (the Swedish Social Insurance Agency) and Trafikverket (the Swedish Transport Administration), have successfully federated their entirely separate real time communications systems.

Our hyper-connected world is synonymous with progress. Digital transformation promises efficiently-run smart cities, improved economic performance, better healthcare outcomes and all the rest of it. Simultaneously, interconnections also create vulnerabilities; from ransomware crippling public services, to cyber attacks designed to damage critical national infrastructure, or silently extract sensitive data for years on end.

For years, end-to-end encryption (E2EE) has been the gold standard for digital privacy. But it has always come with a silent trade-off: when you add a new member to an encrypted chat, they arrive at a blank slate (as in, they can’t see conversation history). Any previous conversation - no matter how vital to their onboarding - remained locked away, accessible only to those who were already there.

Across Europe, sovereign communications systems are already being deployed, and crucially, they don’t have to exist in isolation. An overlooked part of achieving genuine digital sovereignty is ensuring that an organisation has the ability to switch easily between vendors to guard against vendor lock-in.

Since we launched the Element Server Suite (ESS) Community edition, we’ve been thrilled by the momentum. We are seeing a whole wave of new deployments and steadily growing engagement within the community. It’s clear that more people than ever want a robust, manageable way to host their own Matrix stack.