Collabora's Danish Ministry Pilot: A Modest Test, Not a Microsoft Exit
Collabora has clarified the scope of its involvement with Denmark's digitalization ministry, pushing back against characterizations of the effort as a wholesale replacement of Microsoft's productivity suite.
The company behind the Collabora office software has released its own account of a pilot program within Denmark's government, responding to earlier reporting—including coverage from this outlet—that had framed the initiative as Denmark abandoning Microsoft's office tools.
When the ministry first announced the effort, officials had been explicit about its limited scope: a test involving a single department's staff. At that time, Caroline Stage Olsen, the minister overseeing the project, made clear that major technology vendors were not being summarily dismissed.
A volunteer test, not a switch
Starting in June 2025, volunteers working in the Danish digitalization ministry began drafting documents using Collabora rather than Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The integration of Collabora into the ministry's existing systems fell to cBrain, a Danish firm responsible for the F2 case and document management platform.
From the outset, ministry officials framed the initiative as exploratory, with any broader deployment contingent on how the test performed. Shortly after launch, the ministry clarified to Version2 that no commitment to phase out Microsoft products existed and that replacing Windows with Linux was not under consideration.
A December report in Ingeniøren, drawing on correspondence between ministry and cBrain officials obtained through public records requests, documented problems encountered during the trial period. Participants reported difficulties including blank documents from other government agencies, challenges accepting tracked changes, and unexpected line spacing behavior. The reporting covered developments leading up to an October evaluation session where testers were expected to decide whether to continue with Collabora.
In a follow-up story the same day, Frejdie Søndergaard-Gudmandsen, cBrain's head of product management, characterized the technical issues as typical of early-stage pilots. Reporting also indicated that the ministry had chosen to extend the project into 2026.
Two versions of why it stopped
When speaking with Ingeniøren in October, a ministry spokesperson attributed the project's halt to disruption caused by the election cycle, noting that the planned evaluation never took place and that staff have since returned to using Microsoft products with no intention of switching back.
Collabora's account offers a different explanation. According to the company, a June reorganization eliminated the digitalization ministry as an independent entity, leaving the pilot without institutional support before evaluation could be completed. Collabora contends this administrative shift should not be interpreted as evidence of failure on the part of its software.
The election occurred in February, after which the incoming government in June consolidated the digitalization ministry into a larger research and education ministry. Collabora states that the initial phase of testing succeeded, that its engineering team resolved the issues raised by participants, and that the company absorbed the cost of this work. The company also notes that lessons from the pilot are informing ongoing collaboration with other Danish government bodies and with cBrain, and that a formal evaluation was never completed.
On October 27, Christina Egelund, the research, education, and digitalization minister, told DR's P1 Morning show that she had limited insight into why the project concluded without proper assessment and noted that the decision to end it had been made by her predecessor.
Where our earlier coverage ran ahead
In June 2025, this outlet reported, citing Politiken, that the ministry was transitioning from Office 365 to LibreOffice, with complete adoption anticipated by autumn. The ministry subsequently clarified that no decision to eliminate Microsoft products had been made and described a narrower volunteer-based trial instead.
Politiken issued a correction to its original article, and this outlet removed an inaccurate reference to Linux at the time, though the headline and the autumn timeline remained unchanged.