Federation vs. vendor lock-in: Sweden just picked a side

A new report from eSam, Sweden's public sector digital collaboration initiative, addresses a challenge familiar to government IT teams across Europe: how do we enable collaboration across agency boundaries while maintaining control of our infrastructure and data?

Published in January 2026, "Common Federation Protocol for Public Sector Chat" examines different approaches to this challenge. The report positions Rocket.Chat as a strong contender among solutions that support open federation protocols, making it a compelling choice for organizations prioritizing federation capabilities. More importantly, it frames a strategic choice that European government agencies will increasingly face in the coming years.

Understanding the collaboration challenge

Government employees are shifting from traditional email and instant messaging toward more cohesive collaboration: persistent chat, file sharing, video, digital whiteboards, and AI capabilities. This creates an expectation that external collaboration should match what's available within their own agencies.

Today's landscape is fragmented across many different tools and platforms. As agencies move away from legacy solutions like Skype for Business, each chooses based on their unique operational needs, legal requirements, and security assessments. In principle, this diversity is healthy: agencies get solutions tailored to their contexts.

But fragmentation makes cross-government collaboration increasingly difficult while dependence on a few global providers grows. This poses risks to digital sovereignty, legal uncertainty, and control over sensitive information.

Meanwhile, the practical need for collaboration continues. The finance ministry coordinates with the tax authority, health departments work with regional agencies, emergency services communicate across jurisdictions. These different systems must work together.

The eSam report identifies the risk: "If authorities do not take ownership of their ability to collaborate across agency boundaries, there is a risk that the public sector will in practice standardize its conditions for collaboration around a few commercial suppliers."

The federation alternative

Federation offers a different approach. Rather than all agencies adopting the same vendor's platform, they can maintain their own infrastructure choices while still communicating through open protocols.

Consider how email works: whether you use Gmail, Outlook, or your own mail server, messages still get delivered because all systems speak SMTP. The eSam report examines how this concept could apply to modern collaboration tools including persistent chat, video, and file sharing.

This isn't just a Swedish concern. The EU has been moving this direction through regulations like NIS2, the Digital Markets Act, and the Interoperable Europe Act. Digital sovereignty has evolved from a policy concept to a practical requirement for many government agencies.

The use cases that drive requirements

The eSam report is ultimately about solving real operational problems. Here are a few scenarios that come up repeatedly:

Cross-agency task forces with different security classifications need to collaborate while each agency maintains its own security perimeter.

International cooperation across EU member states requires respecting each nation's data residency requirements. Federated communication means no one has to store data in another country's jurisdiction.

Emergency response often happens when normal infrastructure is compromised. Federation protocols work with intermittent connectivity, ensuring collaboration continues when primary networks go down.

Public-private partnerships between government agencies and contractors, NGOs, or private sector partners need controlled boundaries without giving external parties access to internal systems.

Rocket.Chat approach to federation

When we built federation into Rocket.Chat, we started from a simple premise: organizations should maintain complete control over who they communicate with and how that communication happens.

We began our federation journey by integrating the Matrix protocol through external homeservers. This taught us what government deployments actually need, and where the complexity barriers are. As a Matrix.org sponsor, we evolved to a native implementation that optimizes the protocol for operational simplicity. Starting with version 7.11 and advancing through 8.0, federation is now built directly into the platform.

The difference this makes: organizations building on Matrix typically deploy separate homeserver software, manage additional databases, and build protocol-level expertise. Our native approach eliminates that: federation uses your existing Rocket.Chat infrastructure. No external components to secure or maintain.

This architectural choice matters for how agencies allocate engineering resources. 

In practice, when two agencies need to collaborate, administrators at each organization explicitly establish trust. It's bilateral, closed by default, and fully auditable. Messages and files synchronize across federated channels, but data stays within each organization's deployment. The governance model—trust relationships, permissions, audit trails—operates at the platform level, not through individual server configurations.

Because we use the Matrix protocol, Rocket.Chat can interoperate with other Matrix-compatible platforms while maintaining platform choice and governance control.

Strategic considerations for agencies

As the eSam report emphasizes, choosing an open federation protocol requires more than technical capability. Success depends on organizational readiness and long-term strategic thinking.

When evaluating options, we suggest to consider potential challenges: 

• How much custom development will be needed to create a complete collaboration experience? 
• Will your team need to build specialized expertise around protocol infrastructure that's separate from your platform? 
• What happens when federation requirements evolve - can the platform adapt, or will you need to manage that complexity yourself?

Many organizations using Matrix for government deployments pursue custom development on top of the protocol to create enterprise-ready collaboration suites. This can become a costly, lengthy endeavor. Understanding whether you're evaluating a protocol implementation or a complete platform matters significantly for planning and resource allocation.

Ready to explore the federation model for your agency? 

Our team works with government agencies across Europe and globally on secure collaboration infrastructure, including agencies in Sweden exploring federated deployments. 

If you're evaluating federated collaboration options, we’d be happy to discuss how Rocket.Chat's approach might align with your requirements and timeline.

Talk to our experts. 

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