Some disappointing, but perhaps not entirely unsurprising news this week out of Denmark — after announcing last year that they would transition away from Microsoft’s proprietary software, the realities of making it work seem to have caught the government off guard. The word is that a trial program immediately ran into problems when government employees that had been given Collabora tried to collaborate with their peers running Office, and has since been quietly abandoned.
Although there’s probably a joke to be made about different parts of the government not knowing what the other ones are talking about, the reality is that if one group of staffers can’t reliably access the data being produced by another, that’s a pretty big problem. Of course, had they simply asked us nerds, we could have advised them that these sort of issues are inevitable if you don’t fully commit to the effort.
Had the entire government moved to the Open Document Format (ODF) at once they would have avoided the issue, at least when it came to newly created documents, but obviously that’s a considerably larger undertaking than installing Collabora or OpenOffice on a few dozen machines and calling it a day. There’s no word yet on how this stumble will impact Denmark’s larger effort to free themselves of proprietary software, but we’d hazard a guess it’s not a great sign. Hopefully things go better for the Dutch.
