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.

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

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

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.

sounds like they didn't try very hard

100% it was a hot dumpster fire of a Sharepoint deployment that made it impossible to migrate.

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.

too quick to surrender

They're getting threatened by the US and they can't even change a word processor, lol good luck to them

They got the call.

Denmark has abandoned plans to ditch technical problems

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.

Ffs, ignorance and laziness aren't excuses.

Satya Nadella pets a white cat.

Great going denmark. /s This should not have been much of a challange. And you failed.

How big was the bribe?

I could easily believe that it was more work than they expected and so they decided that it wasn't worth it after all, but man. Do it anyway.

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

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.

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.

Did MS offer them a huge deal?

I genuinely, genuinely don't understand the need for microsoft office. A text editor has sufficed for everything I have ever wanted to do.

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?

EU leaders are lying to you. This is a global class war.

You can be sure Microsoft was working its utmost hardest to make this not work, and make it look bad. All the more reason to get away from them as fast as possible.

The best way is to stop using office documents altogether. It's legacy computing that at shouldn't be needed any more.

I bet OpenAI and Copilot were the original source of this information.

They didn't even try. It seems it was all a show.

What, did they try Win+E and it wouldn't open a file browser on linux? 🤣

edit: Oh my bad, i read that as Microsoft, not Microsoft office.

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.