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So they discovered they had locked themselves in harder than expected, and concluded they should stay locked in. That's... one strategy you choose, I guess.
Exactly my thought. Every journey begins with the first step. If i give up on the first step, i just stay where i am. Good for MS though, their strategy to make transition to other formats as diffcult as possible is a success.
Macroslop decide to build another big center in Kopenhagen?
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.
Now I have to check who won the elections...
Lol, as expected, the right-wingers and liberal had a wave and those corrupt pricks probably cancelled it. What a surprise.
😬 exactly what's wrong with the world.
"it wasn't perfect on the first try so we're going to just give up" idiocy.
Microsoft needs to be dismantled.
you have no idea how government works. Change one setting in email and the whole government grinds to a halt. Hundreds have to take time off for emotional trauma and long term disability with PTSD.
Change an entire software ecosystem? Good luck.
Lame as fuck
The flow of bribe money and favors not continuing might be a problem for some, but I would not categorise it as a "technical" one.
Maybe this was a concession to Trump for Greenland? Its actually a strategic issue for USA.
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.
Huh. Politically/Lobby motivated? I hope there'll be a follow-up.
It doesn't sound like the formatting issues mentioned were the reason they abandoned this; that bit reads like filler to me because the actual news is so unsatisfying. Im/Exporting from/to MS formats not working 100% is also nothing new. And other institutions succesfully made the switch, so this is clearly workable.
Seems like they need to invade Schleswig again, to get some people who know how to do the switch.
Libre office ffs
Wait, didn't they?
edit:
Collabora Online (often abbreviated as COOL) is an open-source online office suite developed by Collabora, based on LibreOffice Online, the web-based edition of the LibreOffice office suite.
Hm. Depends on what "based on" means here - continuously, or once, when they first forked it.
based on LibreOffice Online
That bit is wrong. Yes, the underlying tech is based on LO but the web frontend is not. IIRC LO Online is about rendering the regular desktop GUI to web technologies whereas Collabora Office uses a new GUI written for the web and LO works in the background. I think not being true LO enough is what caused a rift between The Document Foundation is Collabora a while ago but I'm not too sure.
TDF actually announced to revive LO Online from cold storage to compete against Collabora. Fantastic…
https://assets.theregister.com/2026/03/02/libreoffice_online_deatticized/
https://itsfoss.com/news/document-foundation-collabora-feud/
Libreoffice online is kinda not a thing
EuroOffice is a fork of OnlyOffice
Libreoffice is working on online again
A big issue is that COOL is an electron app, they only support the web version basically. But for web stuff it is pretty good.
They just should make a fork of Libre for all EU goverments to use... give the developers of this fork a few million and you're golden
That is the point yeah
Nobody wants to maintain Libreoffice apparently, also because LO online is not a thing yet.
OnlyOffice already kinda worked, there already is an app (likely electron)
This is a decision that needs to be revisited.
While no evaluations were conducted for this pilot, there were reports late last year that the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa.
MS Office document importers need to have similar backing as Valve did with Proton. Hopefully Euro Office gets it.
Importing works fine, issues arise after one person exports from LibreOffice, another edits with MS Office, and they repeat a few iterations of that. I thinking changing an office suite is many times more difficult than changing an OS, and am kinda hopeless about interoperability, but I also hope Euro-Office gets major funding from countries to give it a try.
Importing works fine
Quote says that it literally does not. The "and vice versa" bit of the quote is about both directions not properly working.
issues arise after one person exports from LibreOffice, another edits with MS Office, and they repeat a few iterations of that.
Tests for that can be automated since 15 or so years ago. Doesn't even need any Claude or something.
Yeah, and that would work, if Microsofts format actually could be considered a standard in any way. But it doesn't. Some random Microsoft update breaks stuff, you fix it, but IT does not patch...so you have a lot of users telling their bosses "LibreOffice bad". When you're playing catch up with somebody who doesn't want to be catched and is setting the pace...you're going to lose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I guess you can only escape, if somehow governments were forced to only accept open standards. Internally and externally. You send a docx or whatever? Screw you, odf or bust. But it's too niche of a topic to gain momentum for that.
Yeah, and that would work, if Microsofts format actually could be considered a standard in any way. But it doesn’t.
Win32, DirectX, etc. aren't standard either and yet Wine/Proton are proper clean room reverse engineered solutions good enough that >95% of the time users don't see any difference.
Microsoft update breaks stuff, you fix it
Problem is that even legacy documents are not properly read.
so you have a lot of users telling their bosses “LibreOffice bad”.
Collabora is a commercial enterprise. Collabora Office is FOSS just like Proton but just like Proton there is a company behind it that bets their income on proper compatibility. Difference is that Valve works on that compatibility and Collabora doesn't.
Collabora need to get their act together and automate document round-tripping.
Yeah, because I never have to switch Proton or Wine versions or use some launch options or something. I bet if the average docx opener was as willing to tinker as the average Linux gamer, we would not have a problem.
Plus your Steam stuff is not fleet managed. That is what I mean: if your company IT (as we're talking government agencies here) is not providing updates, the current version can be as good as you want, it doesn't arrive at the user's computer, thus the user hates it.
And, come on, legacy documents don't render correctly? Guess what, try to open old Microsoft Office shit in new Microsoft office programs: that shit breaks, like, a lot. Not even Microsoft can stay Microsoft compatible 😅.
Yeah, because I never have to switch Proton or Wine versions or use some launch options or something.
95% of the time they don't. And that's the point.
And, come on, legacy documents don’t render correctly? Guess what, try to open old Microsoft Office shit in new Microsoft office programs: that shit breaks, like, a lot. Not even Microsoft can stay Microsoft compatible 😅.
Well, if Collabora Office was as compatible as MS Office, Denmark would have switched. But it's not and denial won't change anything. I have an old .doc (not .docx) file that my employer needs for a weird edge case and the only way I can open it under Linux is the Office.com web suite.
Again, Collabora is a commercial enterprise. They need to act like it and throw resources at massively improving file format compatibility, no matter how messy MS formats are.
95% of the time they don't. And that's the point.
95% of the time Microsoft formats render fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You write "edge case" yourself. And when you're in the field of providing compatibility you'll see that Microsofi is hostile. And they hava a good business case to be that hostile, can' t really blame them from said business perspective.
But the way forward is not playing catch. What institutions need to understand is that there'll never be a drop-in replacement. Especially not, as people have learned the quirks of MS Office. That is why users blame an alternative office suit but when MS Office breaks once again it's just how it is.
If companies, really any institutions want to break free of MS Office they need to really treat it as the complicaten change process it is. That means allocating resources for changing and adapting said edge cases. When you just go to randomly install some flavor of Libre Office for 38 employees, but everything else stays the same...yeah, you gonna fail big time, no surprise there. But you would fail anyway, even if we had perfect compatibility today. Because tomorrow the next MS update will break compatibility and your 38 users are the idiots of the institution again, until the next update drops.
95% of the time Microsoft formats render fine ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Ask the Danes if that's true. Apparently not so much.
You write “edge case” yourself.
In my case yes. In case of the Danish public sector it's either not an edge case or 5% broken documents are way too much. I'm not a Dane in the public sector to tell which it is but it appears to be one of those two.
But the way forward is not playing catch.
Forward not, but it is to deal with countless of existing documents. There is no way around this fact. That's like expecting Steam Decks to be successful by not providing compatibility with existing Windows games. Valve tried already with the first generation of Steam Machines / SteamOS 1.x & 2.x. Didn't work.
Are native Steam Linux Runtime native games a better path forward than relying in Proton? Absolutely. Will there ever be a Linux version of Diablo 4? No.
A community project like LibreOffice can afford not to care much about legacy MS Office documents. A commercial enterprise that expects to get public contracts absolute cannot. And what's so insane about this is that Collabora is actually the main contractor for Valve on SteamOS and yet they don't transfer the business learnings from that to their own office suite.
Have you read the article at all?
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.
This was no "we evaluated, it did not work". It was "we don't like this. Hey, Bob, please tell us how it doesn't work" - "Sure, I had this one document which rendered wrongly" - "see, it doesn't work, now we can scratch the project".
Have you read the article at all?
Unlike you I actually did.
This was no “we evaluated, it did not work”.
there were reports late last year that the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa.
It was “we don’t like this. Hey, Bob, please tell us how it doesn’t work” - “Sure, I had this one document which rendered wrongly” - “see, it doesn’t work, now we can scratch the project”.
Vivid imagination. Nothing of that kind is in the article but you seem to have made up your mind.
There were reports. Yeah, like your report of "I have this edge case, where it doesn't work", but you seem to have made up your mind 😅
Still got a year left on their subscription.
Typical digital Denmark L.
I hope that they revisit this decision
The Orange Moron has swallowed the old Greenland deal presented to him as new, everyone! Please continue consuming at your regular rate and do not worry at all that he'll return for more at a later point in time.
//Edit: ffs! Within minutes of posting this, the following headline pops up in my feed: Trump falsely asserts that Denmark had given the US Greenland at a campaign rally in Georgia
So, Denmark... I suppose the tests resume on Monday, right?
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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