Did MS offer them a huge deal?
They’re getting threatened by the US and they can’t even change a word processor, lol good luck to them
One thing I hate, but came to understand about governments and big companies, - is that they only leave stuff if it starts falling apart under them due to lack of support and growing incompatibilities.
Because otherwise the “technical problems” in the title can possibly be one Excel spreadsheet that turned out to not be bug-to-bug compatible when opened in LO.
And now I’ve read the article, and with the exception of Collabora instead of LO, this is even dumber, they’ve cancelled the pilot due to “formatting issues”. Even after looking a bit at big companies I think they are f-ng parasites and should have somehow gotten used to those “blank pages”, thank you very much.
That’s an excuse. I say continue the pilot, and fire the focus group of 38 lazy ministerial jerks.
But OK, I’m not a Danish citizen, so please be my guest, you hypothetical Danish citizen reading this, to borrow my opinion.
Used to work IT for american municipalities. I can guarantee you that if a single sheet looked at all different, id get a call. They mindlessly press the same 4 buttons they know how to press and ignore everything else until it “breaks”
Used to work IT at a university during the transition time from Win 3.11 to Win95. The amount of emotional hand-holding (not even so much technical support) involved in getting the admin staff through the process was unbelievable to me at my young age. Now I understand, but back then I was expecting way more “this doesn’t work” or “I can’t find this program” and way less “I don’t know how I’m going to do my job.”
Doing these things is not easy and they take a lot of time and effort. But from a short look at the article it seems that there were issues with expectations:
the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa
Like what do you expect when using an ODF first tool for OpenXML (Microsoft Office) documents? Euro-Office would be a better fit, from my ONLYOFFICE experience. It’s not perfect but it’s the more drop-in solution for their use case. It’s sad that this has come to an end because of what a good, experienced Linux user could tell them even before they began.
They got the call.
I bet OpenAI and Copilot were the original source of this information.
too quick to surrender
sounds like they didn’t try very hard
I wonder if detecting incompatibilities in rendering docx formatted documents in LibreOffice and Collabora is something that AI models could actually help with. If you had a large enough dataset of various docx (or other Microsoft formatted files) you could have Word and LibreOffice render each of the files and then have the model check the two renderings for differences. If something shows up you could probably use a second model to highlight what elements of the relevant docx file was at fault. That way when something shows up consistently the tool could provide that data to the relevant teams to fix the problem. I think there will always be so many edge cases with problems like this that having humans test at this scale wouldn’t be a good use of engineering time.
What a bunch of weak ass removed. I did it a few years ago. I’m on Nextcloud and collabora. I spend a lot of my life in spreadsheets. In their defense, collabora’s choices when it comes to key commands and defaults could not possibly be more stupid. For example, if you are pasting something into a spreadsheet, only a clown would think the default should be paste with formatting? At least give us a “ctl-shift-V” or something like that. So stupid. Just mimic google sheets and be done with it.
I don’t agree with their decision, but migrating any large organization to new software is typically a lot more difficult than migrating a single home user.
Maybe, but sometime you cannot stop trying to do something just because it is difficult, especially if you are a State government.
Of course. I just don’t think “I can do it, therefore Denmark can do it” is that good of an argument.
Agreed. But Fyi, I’m not a home user, I own a small business.We have to train employees on Collabpra and other open source tools. Its not that hard. We have tons of collaborative, shared documents that our clients interact with. Cybersecurity is a thing, but its not all that difficult to not be slave, or involuntary contributor to the dark side.live by your principles or capitulate. I know which choice I’ll make. I also know that 90+% of people wouldn’t even consider the extra burden of defining, much less living on principles. That’s so sad.
Y’all being surprised is the funny part.
Says Microsoft propaganda site.
