Denmark’s Collabora Pilot Was Never The Microsoft Replacement it Was Made Out to Be

Collabora has published its own account of the Danish ministry pilot that earlier coverage, including ours, had described as Denmark moving off Microsoft's office software.

The ministry's own launch release had described it as a test by a group of employees in one department. Back then, the minister handling this, Caroline Stage Olsen, had said the tech giants were not being tossed out the door overnight.

A volunteer test, not a switch

The pilot began in June 2025, when volunteers in the Danish digitalization ministry's own department started writing documents in Collabora instead of Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint editors.

cBrain, the Danish company behind the ministry's F2 case and document management system, was tasked with integrating Collabora into it.

The ministry presented it as a test from the beginning and said that a wider rollout in the department depended on the results. Days later, it told Version2 (in Danish) that no decision to phase out Microsoft had been made and that the plan was not to replace Windows with Linux.

Ingeniøren reported in December (also in Danish) that testers had complained about documents from other government agencies that opened blank, track changes that were difficult to accept, and line spacing that appeared odd.

Its story was based on ministry and cBrain correspondence obtained through a records request, and it covers the months up to an evaluation workshop in October, where testers were to say whether they wanted to keep using Collabora.

Later that day, a second story had Frejdie Søndergaard-Gudmandsen, cBrain's head of product management, calling the bugs normal for a pilot. It was also reported that the ministry had decided to continue into 2026.

Two versions of why it stopped

The ministry's press officer told Ingeniøren in October that the election call interrupted the project, that it was not evaluated as planned, and that staff don't use Collabora today and have no plans to.

Collabora's statement gives a different cause. It says the June reorganization ended the digitalization ministry as a separate ministry and left the pilot without a home before the evaluation was done, and that this shouldn't be characterized as a finding against the suite.

The election was called in February, and the new government that took office in June merged the digitalization ministry into the research and education ministry.

Collabora adds that the first phase worked, that its engineers resolved the tickets testers raised, and that it paid for that work itself. It also says the experience is carrying into work with other Danish authorities and cBrain, and that formal assessment was never finalized.

On October 27, the research, education, and digitalization minister Christina Egelund said on DR's P1 Morning show that she knows little about why the project ended without a proper evaluation and pointed out that the decision was made under the previous minister.

Where our earlier coverage ran ahead

Our June 2025 article said, citing Politiken's report, that the ministry was moving from Office 365 to LibreOffice, with full adoption expected by autumn. The ministry later said no decision to phase out Microsoft had been made and described a smaller volunteer pilot.

Politiken soon corrected its own article, and we fixed the Linux claim at the time, but our headline and the autumn timeline stayed as they were.