This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
pilot phase with 38 ministry employees kicked off last year to trial Collabora's suite with Office documents. However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora's performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
So it was a performance more or less, without any plan to actually switch.
When elections took place could mean someone that won was pro America or Microsoft
There was no real change of power, Denmark is still ruled by their xenophobic self-declared social democrats busy teaming up with Italian post-fascists to undermine international rule of law. While there is little meaningful difference between Mette Fredriksen and Georgia Meloni she's pretty much as left as Danish politics goes, the only parties left of this mess (the Ø and Å lists, not kidding) are marginal and have never had real power.
Traditionally Denmark has had no political line for themselves, and have followed America completely. They are completely new to trying to think original thoughts in terms of foreign policy, and we should expect to see them stumble a bit. I guess it's refreshing to see them pretend to try.
Yeah, even little pockets of US government are making Linux desktop builds because of licensing and hardware constraints.
It specifically says that performance wasn’t benchmarked.
The root cause is incompatibility with Microsoft’s proprietary document format causing fuckiness for LibreOffice based Collabora. E.g. formatting issues.
They could’ve tried the Russian alternative but I guess they’d prefer to gargle Microsoft’s fetid cock some more.
I think they meant that the whole thing was "a performance"... A theater. Not that the performance of the product had anything to do with it.
Performance as in performative
Microsoft's specification has previously caused problems for other vendors like LibreOffice's The Document Foundation (TDF) too. There is some controversial history behind this feud between the two formats
No, there was no feud. What happened is that when Microsoft had to create an open document format that everyone could use, they purposefully made their format impossible to implement by anyone. IIRC, The open doc forma spec does it all and is 1500 pages large, whereas the Microsoft format doc is well over 6000 pages long and contains closed parts still anyways.
This is just standard Microsoft strategy and it worked again and dumb fucks again decided to stay married to Microsoft Microsoft because at apparently they love being abused
They got the call.
This is borderline fake news. This pilot project was launched poorly by the ministry responsible for digitisation because the minister wanted his own project running so he could bash other ministries for not doing anything. It’s ironic, like rain on your wedding day.
There are multiple pilot projects across the Danish range of ministries. Many are in much better shape because they’ve actually been thought through: example
Yeah, this is how monopolistic digital companies operate. Every time you try and pivot from their bullshit “ecosystem” you encounter “technical difficulties” because they’ve surreptitiously extended their tentacles beyond their products. Getting off of these systems will take a concentrated effort and it’s unfortunate that governments just aren’t willing to do it.
Denmark has abandoned plans to ditch technical problems
Ffs, ignorance and laziness aren't excuses.
It seems they tried to ditch Microsoft Office but to keep docx. What they need to do is to ditch docx first and start using open document format, then let the software follow.
I don't think that's very likely as nobody seem to understand what file formats are or why they matter. So the second best option is probably to wait for Euro-Office to hopefully take off, and then hopefully Euro-Office can change default to ODT at some point in the future and we can finally get rid of docx once and for all.
Great going denmark. /s This should not have been much of a challange. And you failed.
I rather disagree, this was always going to be hard. Microsoft will have put serious pressure on them not to switch, and its pain-in-the-ass proprietary lock-in tactics create a lot of friction in making a transfer. And let's also acknowledge that the average office worker is so much a creature of habit that they can't easily adapt to new software without costly trainings and months of service, and even then many people never fully adapt. I don't love that Denmark is stepping back, but let's not pretend that entrenched technologies and contracts are easy to switch.
My organization is slowly switching away from all Microsoft and other SaaS software, there's never been a better time to switch to open source, ever.
The only reason it's taking long is because we are a small team and don't have the capacity to handle that project full time, so it comes one small incremental step at a time.
A government has the resources to employ the right talent to get the job done, it's either incompetence or interference.
Edit:
A pilot phase with 38 ministry employees kicked off last year to trial Collabora's suite with Office documents. However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora's performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
It was interference.
100% it was a hot dumpster fire of a Sharepoint deployment that made it impossible to migrate.
One thing I hate, but came to understand about governments and big companies, - is that they only leave stuff if it starts falling apart under them due to lack of support and growing incompatibilities.
Because otherwise the "technical problems" in the title can possibly be one Excel spreadsheet that turned out to not be bug-to-bug compatible when opened in LO.
And now I've read the article, and with the exception of Collabora instead of LO, this is even dumber, they've cancelled the pilot due to "formatting issues". Even after looking a bit at big companies I think they are f-ng parasites and should have somehow gotten used to those "blank pages", thank you very much.
That's an excuse. I say continue the pilot, and fire the focus group of 38 lazy ministerial jerks.
But OK, I'm not a Danish citizen, so please be my guest, you hypothetical Danish citizen reading this, to borrow my opinion.
Used to work IT for american municipalities. I can guarantee you that if a single sheet looked at all different, id get a call. They mindlessly press the same 4 buttons they know how to press and ignore everything else until it "breaks"
Used to work IT at a university during the transition time from Win 3.11 to Win95. The amount of emotional hand-holding (not even so much technical support) involved in getting the admin staff through the process was unbelievable to me at my young age. Now I understand, but back then I was expecting way more "this doesn't work" or "I can't find this program" and way less "I don't know how I'm going to do my job."
Back in 2025, the government of Denmark announced that it is ditching Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of open-source alternatives like Linux.
Denmark's reasoning was that it wants to reduce reliance on a U.S. vendor like Microsoft and also not be at the mercy of a volatile Trump administration. Now, it appears that the country has failed in its ambitious endeavor.
Adoption of this European software would have been an important step in Denmark's bid for technological independence from software made by a U.S. firm.
A pilot phase with 38 ministry employees kicked off last year to trial Collabora's suite with Office documents. However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora's performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
Microsoft must have truly been shitting it. 38 whole people trying out other software.
I mean how hard would it have been for Microsoft to just pay a few of those 38 if any of them had been taking it seriously to begin with.
No benchmarking, and the attempt at switching ended with the elections.
Could it even have been called an attempt?
Microsoft must have truly been shitting it. 38 whole people trying out other software
That's not the point, the problem for Microsoft is that when people begin to realize we don't need Microsoft products because open source solutions work, it will spread like fire.
The attempt was however half assed, and Microsoft never really needed to worry.
Doing these things is not easy and they take a lot of time and effort. But from a short look at the article it seems that there were issues with expectations:
the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa
Like what do you expect when using an ODF first tool for OpenXML (Microsoft Office) documents? Euro-Office would be a better fit, from my ONLYOFFICE experience. It's not perfect but it's the more drop-in solution for their use case. It's sad that this has come to an end because of what a good, experienced Linux user could tell them even before they began.
I see this all the damned time. Some people are obsessed with pages breaking at a heading or figure so they insert manual page breaks all over the damned place.
Even the slightest font kerning difference and you end up with blank or mostly blank page when some manual page break gets pushed to the next page.
Delete the manual page break that never should have been there? Nah, just cancel everything.
So TDF has a fascinating article on their blog discussing how the Austrian military made the switch. It took a lot of planning and there was a huge amount of work to help move people along.
I suspect this may not have been the case here. But I’m sure we’ll find out the gory details soon enough
I swear I have been reading this article for 20 years. Some gov org balks at Microsoft cost and pitches free alternative. They dont plan on spending extra to complete the transition and then dont adequately train or build out the infrastructure.
Replacing an intrenched system with a free software alternative successfully will require more money in the first few years, not less.
Did MS offer them a huge deal?
Only some vacations for deciders.
Satya Nadella pets a white cat.
How big was the bribe?
This is not particularly surprising since Collabora leverages the Open Document Format (ODF) rather than Microsoft's proprietary OOXML specification. Microsoft's specification has previously caused problems for other vendors like LibreOffice's The Document Foundation (TDF) too.
While it seems elections killed this initiative, the above is why I recommended EuroOffice or OnlyOffice for converts. It has a more MS feel and much, much better support for conversions.
I'm still confused why TDF hasn't put more time into opening other formats.
EU leaders are lying to you. This is a global class war.
They didn't even try. It seems it was all a show.
I don't have much experience with Collabora but what I have wasn't great. I'm very much in favour of governments ditching MS for something like Libre Office. But I also know that the formatting errors can be a pain in the røv especially if you have 20 year old Excel sheets full of important information spiked with macros that civil servants who have long since retired made ages ago. It's minefields within minefields.
So I think many things can be true at the same time. Denmark would like to rely less on American software and services. It was in the interest of the government to communicate that loudly at a time when the mad orange hand was reaching for Greenland (and may do so again because what's in a treaty?). The Collabora trial could have been an earnest effort that failed for many reasons I don't have trouble imagining. Or it was a show piece, a signal to the Danish voters as well as American companies. Your contacts may not be as certain any more. It may have led to some increased MS lobbying bts. And this doesn't mean this is the end of the effort. Just this one, at this point in time.
The big problem is this: success stories of governments switching to something open source are rare. You don't win elections when people are fed up with long processing times in government services. They'd have to be sufficiently pissed off with the mad orange to tolerate that out of spite. And with the urgency of the Greenland crisis having subsided, the level of pissedoffness will have also declined.
I would put some money on it either being.
1: Some senior bod didn't like that they had to learn where one new button was, and threw their toys out of the pram. 2: The macros thing you mentioned. So many of these were done back in the day, VBA code that no-one knew about until they tried to open the sheet in another office package and it exploded.
That last paragraph is interesting because in my opinion; Europe has been supporting the US, so they have no room to talk. I got tired of the why don't you protest bullshit. It's because you paid for it, with every arms, apple, google, amd, nvidia, intel, microsolp, etc purchase that the US made. This isn't a popular opinion but it should be recognized that you're indirectly paying in as well.
Open software should be pursued.
I genuinely, genuinely don't understand the need for microsoft office. A text editor has sufficed for everything I have ever wanted to do.
Excel spreadsheets bigger than databases. And the userbase doesn’t know any other options because of monopoly.
It's actually amazing that Microsoft has been able to keep their users inside their walled garden for so many decades. When I was a teenager in the 90s, the same argument was used... That their users don't care to look for other options. And it's as true now as then.
It’s not really a walled garden; it’s just complacency and incentives.
Says Microsoft propaganda site.
I bet OpenAI and Copilot were the original source of this information.
