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.
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?
They’re getting threatened by the US and they can’t even change a word processor, lol good luck to them
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.”
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.
It’s always going to be a band-aid ripping moment, switching from MS Office to anything else.
When I switched to Linux on my personal setups, it was at a time when Windows and Office were so different to what I was used to, I’d have to retool and retrain anyway. From what I hear from some of my white collar acquaintances, that’s basically coming. I’ve been hearing things like “I wrote this spreadsheet 20 years ago, it’s worked fine for decades, and now it’s breaking because they’re disabling VBA and it can’t run from OneDrive.” So I think we’re going to enter an era when all the things that probably shouldn’t have been implemented in Excel are gonna stop working.
It’s like they went straight for the most unintuitive option for MS Office users. Besides EuroOffice, LibreOffice (even OnlyOffice) would have been better.
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.
The worst is that they are expecting complex formats to “just open” and using those complex formats. It’s the EU, such a thing as a modern office format should be standardized the hell through, there should be a format specifically designed for all such places, MSO just shouldn’t be a factor. Yet when MS kickbacks are involved, it’s fine to use something unfit for the task and call a couple of blank pages (at page breaks, I assume) a fatal flaw. Anyway, text formats are complex, but not that complex, MSO’s OOXML is just intentionally left open and with variety of interpretations and with implementation’s data structures not important for anything written into the standard and in general it’s a scam device and MS should have been fined like 50 billion for publishing it and daring to propose it to official entities and as a standard.
What I don’t understand is why can’t we use something like XHTML with <tex> and <ps> and <csv> tags and a WYSIWIG editor.
I mean, OK, I’ve spent a few months playing with prototyping a document format with edits history and comments and it’s not as easy as it seems, but applying what worked for me to a content format like described above with links to blobs by hashes, blobs stored in the same zipfile, one could get something usable for many office tasks.
Not even talking about org-mode, you know, existing, with just a bit of extension that could fill the role of many office applications.
I mean, no need to even talk about “fit for the task” and efficiency. 90s’ WordPerfect was good enough for the same uses. The complexity of formats is a deliberate way to limit competition by MS and a deliberate excuse to keep getting kickbacks for the organizations in question.
There’s just one thing that can be done - to make it mandatory to use software developed by government contract for this specific purpose for all governmental stuff, and make it FOSS, and with a FOSS format, and with specifications simple enough for a student to write an editor.
Anyway. This is all dreams.
They got the call.
I bet OpenAI and Copilot were the original source of this information.
too quick to surrender
Denmark has abandoned plans to ditch technical problems
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.
Kind of hard words like xenophobic, fascist for parties democratically voted for by the majority of voters.
So it stops being xenophobic or fascist when a majority elects them? The literal Nazis were elected by a plurality; would more votes have made them not fascist or not xenophobic?
Georgia Meloni represents Fratelli d’Italia, the successor party of the Alleanza Nazionale, which in turn is the successor of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, which was Mussolini’s party. The succession is direct enough that Fratelli d’Italia still uses the same logo as MSI; a tricolor flame.
See if you can spot the similarity:
If anything I was being generous to Georgia Meloni by referring to her party as post-fascist rather than straight out fascist. There is a clear continuation here. This is not a matter of opinion.
As for the Social Democrats in Denmark being xenophobic, there’s ample evidence. The fact that they would introduce ghetto laws to get rid of immigrant neighbourhoods - and even call them ghetto laws themselves - is one interesting high-profile example.
I don’t know why you don’t already know this, but fascists and xenophobes are capable of voting as well.
I dont know any of denmarks politics, but both can be true. The NSDAP was more or less democratically elected, MAGA as well
Saying the NSDAP was democratically elected to power is a perpetuating a fascist lie. The NSDAP was always using undemocratic methods, such as political violence and voter intimidation, and finally, outright banning and persecuting political opponents and entire political parties. That is not being elected more or less democratically.
If you have been taught bad history, then enlighten yourself, rather than continuing to give fascists false legitimacy.
That has happened in the US for at least about a century and people still consider our presidents democratically elected.
I have been taught good history, by my professors at uni, I am teaching history myself actually, have today actually.
Of course they had their propaganda, scare tactics against opponents and so on. Just like all populists, from the AfD, to MAGA. But they were in ar least one State in the Koalition, so part of the government, in 1930.
After that they were more and more populistic and hateful and despite that they won more and more votes over the following years
It is kinda true though, we just call it something else. And fascism is on the rise here, along with xenophobia. We were always among the first to join the USA in wars while suppressing any questions from critics in the process.
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.
deleted by creator
Performance as in performative
the Russian alternative
You say that like it’s not simply swapping which one you have in your mouth.
It isn’t the same thing, no. The Russian alternative got forked by some EU corporation and relabeled to Euro Office. Further, it’s FOSS, so it can be truly independently audited unlike Microslop’s garbage.
I will urge LibreOffice/Collabora any day. I don’t really care for the Russian BS suite because it still adheres to Microsoft’s proprietary “open” document standards, and so long as you use that bullshit you’ll never own your own documents. You’ll always be beholden to their garbage one way or another.
Doesnt Office export to .odt too? Was any IT savy person involved in this?
It does export to odt, but it still messes up document formatting. Of course this is a solvable issue from a technical perspective, but it’s still a lot of man hours to do so for every single document and template across an entire government.
The format isn’t the problem; the rules for rendering content outside the PDF are more suggestions.
And honestly, even if the rules were adhered to, there’s no way in F that Microsoft would comply just for this very reason
Microsoft’s format is “open” but they don’t follow their own standard so it’s effectively proprietary. I’d be surprised if the odt export even works.
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.
Nope. There’s was no evaluation. No reason to assume this.
sounds like they didn’t try very hard
A big org, all at once, will almost always fail.
Those IT departments aren’t scoped to change the world all at once, and, on the receiving end, government workers generally aren’t a class of people who respond well to large changes.
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.
