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halffullbrain | 8 months ago
Denmark must become less dependent on the major tech giants when it comes to digital solutions in the public sector. Therefore, the Ministry of Digitalization is now starting to test a new open source solution.
This week, the Ministry of Digitalization is launching a new pilot project, where a group of employees will begin testing an open source alternative to the Microsoft Office suite.
Specifically, the open source platform in question is Collabora, which is based on the open source software LibreOffice. The employees in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department participating in the pilot project will have the Office suite in their case management system replaced with Collabora.
"As minister, I’ve spoken about the need to challenge our digital independence. Now we’re taking the first step ourselves in the Ministry of Digitalization with this new pilot project. I don’t delude myself into thinking that this means we’re ready to kick the tech giants out tomorrow, but I see it as a welcome step in the right direction. As politicians, we have an obligation to ensure that our IT systems in the future aren’t dependent on a few large companies," says Minister for Digitalization Caroline Stage.
The ministry is beginning tests of a new integrated document editing module in the F2 case management system, based on the open source platform Collabora built on LibreOffice. This means that ministry employees will test an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite and use open source document editing tools instead of Microsoft’s solutions like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
The solution will be rolled out for broader testing in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department on June 19, 2025. At that time, a group of departmental employees will have their Office suite in F2 replaced with the open source alternative. In the months that follow, the ministry will monitor and test whether Collabora can support the ministry’s workflows and needs in a satisfactory manner.
The upcoming testing work will focus, among other things, on functionality related to the ministry’s templates, formatting for government cases, use of 'track changes', tables, etc., and whether the solution can handle conversion to and from Word format without altering the layout of documents.
If the test period proceeds satisfactorily, the next step is expected to be a broader rollout of the open source alternative throughout the department.
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