Denmark Ends Pilot Replacing Microsoft Office With Collabora

Denmark’s Ministry of Digitization reportedly ended its experiment with the open-source Collabora office suite less than six months after the 2025 pilot began, and a professor at Copenhagen Business School says the project has still not been properly evaluated. The trial was meant to move 38 employees from Word, PowerPoint and Excel to Collabora, and some of them complained about style, paragraph formatting, blank pages and tracking changes.

The pilot and its scope

The ministry, which has since been merged with other ministries and is now the Ministry for Research, Education, and Digitization, launched the pilot in 2025. Caroline Stage, then the digitization minister, initiated the project to reduce the country’s dependence on American technology. Denmark is not alone in stepping away from U.S. software: France and the Netherlands are also taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows.

Complaints and a quiet exit

The experiment had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called an early election in February 2026, less than six months after it started. Employees cited problems with style, paragraph formatting and blank pages, as well as difficulties with tracking changes. The Collabora suite also had to work with the ministry’s central case management system, F2, and it remains unclear why the ministry tested only Collabora, which is built on LibreOffice, rather than alternatives such as OnlyOffice, OpenOffice or Calligra.

An evaluation that never came

Months after the experiment reportedly ended, Professor Mikkel Flyberbom of Copenhagen Business School said the project had not been properly evaluated. Testing alternatives in a pilot is a good idea, he said, but he wished the ministry would learn from the exercise and share those lessons with other parts of the public sector. Comparing three alternatives and reviewing them once the testing period was over would probably have produced a clearer answer about which suite worked best. Recent attempts to build open-source versions of subscription software such as Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Suite with AI have also drawn attention, though governments would likely prefer a reliable, stable build to an experimental AI-made app.

Sources: Tom's Hardware