Post by @rnd@toot.cat

welp

sadly, this is how most of those migrations end, in my experience

i remember some german federal state doing that several times -- announcing a switch away from microsoft and a pilot program to adopt linux, only to then backtrack on that later

Denmark Gives Up On Replacing Microsoft Office With Collabora - Slashdot

Denmark's Ministry of Digitization reportedly abandoned a pilot to replace Microsoft Office with the open-source Collabora suite less than six months after it began. Tom's Hardware reports: According to Danish publication Computerworld, the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employe...

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Woozle Hypertwin

@woozle@toot.cat 2 hr. ago

@rnd It sounds like someone higher up wasn't really committed to the project -- and things like this do take some commitment, even with the best of planning. [/opinion]

/dev/urandom

@rnd@toot.cat 2 hr. ago

@woozle in general, i think that "let's switch away from Microsoft Office" initiatives should instead be reconsidered as "let's switch away from MS Office file formats"

a company that uses ODF internally, even if still mostly running MSO, is more prepared for the nightmare scenario of "oh no, we lost all our access to microsoft products and services" than one that switched to an alternative program while still having its workflow in a proprietary (or semi-proprietary) format

because ODF is a well-documented format that's supported by a whole bunch of programs, and it's easy to tell who's being wrong if a document opens poorly, but the MSO formats are a minefield of undocumented features and proprietary logic

Woozle Hypertwin

@woozle@toot.cat 1 hr. ago

@rnd That strikes me as an excellent start to a properly-planned migration.

Ursidinoj/The Bjornsdottirs

@ellenor2000@mastodon.top 3 hr. ago

@rnd it's insane

i feel like both the best and the worst way such a thing could end is having processes permanently in place that accomodate optional use of the switched-to platform #lang_en

/dev/urandom

@rnd@toot.cat 3 hr. ago

@ellenor2000

imo the idea of "let's have our institution switch from MS Office to LibreOffice/OnlyOffice/Collabora/etc." sets up a task that's more likely to fail than not

the discussion should start with document formats, the fact that MS Office provides two -- one a proprietary binary mess that others have to reverse engineer and another a partially standardized also-mess that still brings in a lot of MS-specific logic, and that ODF is a more reliable standard instead (which MSO also happens to support)

and a workplace that uses ODF is much more prepared for a hypothetical nightmare scenario of "we're locked out from microsoft (presumably by order of the u.s. government)" than one that switched programs, but keeps using MS's document formats (which presumably now risk loading badly for MSO users or users of other open-source office suites)