Denmark Quietly Killed Its Microsoft Exit — Without Ever Saying Whether It Worked

In June 2025, Denmark's digitalisation ministry announced it would walk away from Microsoft entirely: Linux instead of Windows, LibreOffice instead of Office 365, half the staff migrated by summer and the whole ministry free of Microsoft by the autumn. It became the flagship example of Europe's push for technological sovereignty.

This month, the story ended the way failed projects usually do: not with a press conference, but in silence.

What actually happened

The ministry ran a pilot with 38 employees who worked in Collabora, a British open-source office suite, starting in summer 2025. Collabora was tied into F2, the case-management system from Danish vendor cBrain, so testing the exchange of documents with Microsoft formats was central to the trial.

It never got far enough to produce a verdict. When Denmark called elections in spring 2026, the pilot was terminated. A ministry spokesperson has confirmed it will not resume — and that no evaluation was ever carried out. There is no benchmark of Collabora against Office, no write-up of what worked, no record of whether the problems were fixable. Computerworld.dk, which broke the story, called it a flagship project quietly scrapped. Dutch public-sector outlet iBestuur and Neowin both reported the same confirmation from the ministry.

The problems were the predictable ones

Even without an evaluation, reporting during the trial described officials fighting document formatting: blank pages appearing when opening Office files in Collabora and vice versa, trouble with tracked changes. This is the exact failure mode our office-suite alternatives guide keeps coming back to — not features, not price, but the fidelity of the round-trip between Microsoft's OOXML formats and open formats like ODF. Decades of Microsoft's file-format gravity are the moat, and any ministry whose daily work runs on exchanging .docx files with the outside world hits it immediately.

Mikkel Flyverbom, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, made the sharper point to Danish media: by ending the pilot without evaluating it, the ministry destroyed the one thing other government organisations could have learned from. Forty people's worth of evidence about where Microsoft-exit projects actually break — discarded.

What it means for the rest of Europe

Denmark's motive in 2025 was not cost. It was sovereignty: the ICC's Microsoft email disconnection had rattled Europe, and Trump's Greenland talk made dependence on US vendors feel personal. That motivation has not gone away — but this episode is a reminder that announcements are cheap, migrations are years of unglamorous format-conversion work, and a change of government can kill one mid-flight with nobody held accountable.

Germany's Schleswig-Holstein began its own Windows exit back in 2024, and other European bodies are still experimenting with open-source alternatives. The honest reading of Denmark's ending is not "open source failed" — the pilot was never run long enough to pass or fail. It is that the hardest part of leaving Microsoft is not installing Linux. It is the documents.

What remains unconfirmed

Whether the formatting problems were ever solved before the pilot ended, and whether Denmark's new government still holds the digital-sovereignty policy at all. We'll update this post as reporting or official statements land.