The French State is launching a collaborative digital suite allowing public officials to have sovereign, secure, even more efficient digital tools that facilitate remote collaborative work. #

France's largest employer, the public service must guarantee its agents access to efficient, secure digital tools that meet new professional uses. The interministerial digital department (DINUM), whose mission is to make the State simpler, more efficient and more sovereign, has designed and deployed the Digital Suite aimed at bringing together all agents and professionals in the public sphere around services available to the map and interconnected, for fluid and efficient management of daily collaborative work.

The Ministry of Transformation and Public Service announced the launch of The Digital Suite at the service of all public officials who are invited to grab it today.

👉 Read more about La Suite in French

This involves offering users a complete offering including: single authentication facilitating connection to tools (AgentConnect is already accessible to 1.6 million agents and professionals in the public sphere to access interministerial tools of DINUM), authorization and directory; the possibility of connecting to sovereign, à la carte, interconnected applications, based on free software and SecNumCloud infrastructures, based on free digital commons; the daily handling of tools chosen à la carte such as instant communication, holding meetings via audio or video conference, sharing documents and collaboration within teams (for project management among others) as well as the communication by email (for small teams initially), all respecting a common graphic charter in order to be better identified. The use of The Digital Suite and the same tools by all public agents facilitates interministerial collaboration and contributes to the effectiveness of State action.

After the “public official’s digital backpack” launched in 2021, notably accelerated to respond to the health crisis, the Digital Suite now takes over from this initial work.

Among the tools of The Digital Suite offered, some already exist such as:

• Tchap: the trusted instant messaging service for the public sector used daily by 200,000 users. An extension of the Albert AI tool is planned for Tchap soon, during the summer.
• State audio conference with nearly 8,000 users for 700 weekly meetings (2024 figure as of mid-May).
• State web conference with 47,000 users for 10,000 weekly meetings (2024 figure as of mid-May).
• State webinar: the webinar service which can accommodate up to 350 participants, public officials and interlocutors from outside the State (from the public, private or associative sectors) has recorded more than 800,000 users for 65,000 meetings weekly (2024 figure as of mid-May).
• France transfer: the simple and secure solution for sending large files with 140,000 users having exchanged more than 350,000 letters (2024 figure as of mid-May).
• Resana, a public sector collaborative platform with 140,000 users and nearly 800,000 documents shared/month (2024 figure as of mid-May).
• An interministerial initiative, the Digital Suite is the result of collaboration with the ministries (Interior and Overseas and Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion for Tchap, the Ministry of Culture for FranceTransfert, the Ministry of Education and Youth for the State Webinar, as well as the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion for the State Webconference).

A first version of The Digital Suite has been available on an experimental basis since March 2024; some tools are therefore still in the testing phase and others used by hundreds of thousands of agents, like Tchap. The ambition by the end of the year is to offer more interoperability between tools and expand the range of services offered (project management, password manager, appointment making, AI, etc.) .

Initial work towards the territorial digital suite #

In order to strengthen the cybersecurity of local authorities, DINUM, the national agency for territorial cohesion (ANCT) and the national agency for information systems security (ANSSI) are contributing to the deployment of the Territorial Digital Suite in local authorities. communities by opening it to local elected officials and territorial public agents, in partnership with local digital players.

The ambition is to provide communities with a set of secure digital services, including domain name, email server and minimal storage space. The work was initiated at the beginning of 2024 and will continue until at least the end of 2025, the objective of this launch phase being to collect feedback and adjust the offer according to the needs and constraints identified in the field.

Local authorities and local partners wishing to participate in the development of the Territorial Digital Suite are invited to contact the ANCT, facilitator of a pilot group and open workshops organized since March 2024: suiteterritoriale@anct.gouv.fr.

An opening towards private and European players #

Public or private entities with a collaborative solution structured in the form of a digital commons or open source software, wishing to support projects aimed at developing new functionalities as well as projects designed to promote the sustainability and scalability of La Suite Numérique Collaborative products, are encouraged to make themselves known to the DINUM teams. The prize: support from DINUM teams and €40,000 in renewable funding, as part of the Digital Commons Fund: lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/communs

At the beginning of February 2024, France and Germany signed a joint declaration of intent aimed at strengthening their cooperation in the area of ​​digital sovereignty in public administration. A work program structured around two priorities has been established: jointly develop a suite of sovereign digital products based on open source and interoperable solutions making it possible to build a coherent and complete offer of digital tools for public agents, in particular a instant messaging service, by limiting costs and capitalizing on the efforts already made by the two countries to achieve this sovereignty objective. But also, develop artificial intelligence tools for administration, based on large open source language models. Other exchanges with European countries have expressed their interest in participating in these discussions.