This is what is needed to push back on Microsoft.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Danish Ministry switching from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice
(blog.documentfoundation.org)
It seems like they are doing this to push back on mono-culture. Probably just to save money really. Using 365 saved our small office a lot of time, but it is pretty expensive since it is a constant subscription. I already switched away from Adobe at to Wondershare for PDF editing since we can get a single purchase from Wondershare and have to pay a subscription to Adobe. I would be tempted to do the same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling and the integrated sharepoint files is pretty useful.
Nextcloud has a similar file storage like SharePoint/OneDrive minus the content types and taxonomy trees, but I doubt you need those. If you use Only Office as online Office App in Nextcloud, you have a comparable UI to Microsoft and it uses Office Open XML (docx, pptx, xlsx) as standard file system.
I don’t know what a paid hosting for your team would cost, but it could be worth it.
Thank you, I'll give it a look.
Unfortunately change is difficult. If it was just me and my controls team we would probably do something like that, but my boss is a little older and I had hard enough time getting him to work on the cloud as it is, and he works in 2 cities, so he isn't always in reach to help him. If it doesn't behave exactly like windows folders, it might be a lost case.
The other people in the office I could train easier. It's a small office with less than a dozen people on the system at any one time. I am "head of IT" but that isn't my main job. Having something that installs and sets up quickly is a boon. Not that the sharepoint folders update all that quickly, it takes almost a full day for all the files to show up properly, especially if it is a new user. And if onedrive chokes on any one file it completely stops updating file changes until you fix that. Not a problem for anybody with some savvy, but half the people don't even notice until their files have diverged and somebody calls them and asks why they don't see some change or another.
All that being said, if I can save a few hundred dollars a month I could probably eventually talk them into moving over to something cheaper like I did with the Wondershare PDF editor. That was an easy move because it works exactly like Adobe but doesn't crash on large files nearly as often. It is sort of a shame that Adobe is worse at handling their own file format than nearly any other PDF editor.
It probably won't save money in the first year. The transition will likely offset any gains.
It likely will save money every year after that. For everyone. More users means more interest means a smoother experience for everyone, generally.
Probably just to save money really.
That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that's outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis...
same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling
Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.
I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.
They could spend 1~2% of the cost of their microsoft licenses to create their own plugins/development to make the UI more usable for their applications and workers, rather than relying on Microsoft themselves or creating plugins on outdated and proprietary frameworks.
Wouldn't it be easier to strike a support deal with the libre office developers and just give them the money to do it?
The Document Foundation doesn't actually employ developers. They just oversee and manage the development and direction of LibreOffice.
Sure. That is assuming that someone is available on the LibreOffice side to support the ministry for a particular amount, and that the policy related to government procedures can be followed under this agreement.
Pretty sure Collabora (company) offers such services.
Man... every time I use LibreOffice I curse. I'm dyed in the wool pro open source, but LibreOffice has just never cut it for me. I suppose if I had a job to do and that's what I was given it would work.
Same. I have to tinker with it a lot to make it less frustrating to use. I like how customisable it is but man I don't really want to customise everything anymore.
I want a UX that is great out of the box in terms of theming, functionality, and ease of use. I want sane defaults.
I luckily only really use Calc. Ive had no problems with that, but my use cases are fairly primitive probably. What kind of issues did you have while using it and which one Writer/Calc/Draw?
Calc has loads of small papercuts (tiny usability issues) which added together make it quite horrible to use. It's not polished.
I would guess that they, as everyone else, have worked with MS Office all their lives and can do whatever they need without thinking much in there. But libreoffice has some small differences that will break their workflow and will spend time learning how to workaround those instead of doing what they need. For example, my grip is that in MS I can redo the last operation with ctrl+y, where in libre it's ctrl+shift+y. They could very likely allow the former to behave like the latter when redo buffet is empty, but they don't.
There's also Impress, which feels like PowerPoint from 2010 or even earlier
Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but... I'm lucky I've worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think "wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all". It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it's just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?
What do you think about Collabora?
Never heard of it. Only Office was decent though, the couple of times I used it.
If you're open to it, would you mind checking it out and share what you think
The best thing about all these organisations moving away from Microsoft is it incentivizes further development and QA. Or at least I hope all these governments switching to OSS are also funding people to keep a close eye on all the PRs coming in from state-sponsored hackers...
I love the idea of LibreOffice but it really needs to get collaborative features sorted via cloud storage providers or even network shares.
Please No.
With love and respect.
In my line of work we’re constantly changing shared documents, often at the same time. The desktop vanilla version can’t do this yet, so while I can use it happily for personal stuff I haven’t been able to get it to fit in with my job’s workflow yet.
I very much want to get off Office!
Why not? Collaborative editing is extremely useful. I've done it at work, with friends, and with my gf.
There's no reason the government couldn't own it's providers via NextCloud or something.
EDIT: I guess the big, mean old collaborative editing features are out to get us and take away our freedoms and steal our puppies. Collab editing must be Satan's work and there's no way any moral person should find it helpful.
Why libreoffice instead of OnlyOffice or NextCloud?
Maybe they don't want to move to a cloud-based system.
I don't want a cloud-based office package, and I can imagine that the same might apply to them.
Maybe because OnlyOffice is Russian-made and cannot be guaranteed safe
It’s open source….
Not a silver bullet. This is a deep rabbit hole.
They noted that it cannot be guaranteed safe. You can clone a specific version, and perform security audits on that specific version before deployment. Is it a lot of work? Yes. But it is indeed possible.
Libre is the GOAT
Yeah, OnlyOffice is a lot closer to the MS experience which would make it easier for people to transition.
I use both and usually prefer OnlyOffice.
Nextcloud Office is just Libre Office via Collabora though...
Personally, I missed the shortcut Ctrl + D too much in OnlyOffice sheets, but does it really matter?