Are they not doing it once in a while? Switching to LibreOffice and then coming back to MS Office?

Sounds more like a deal shopping.

Yep, most likely to help negotiate lower bids / deals.

The day this gets interesting is the day Microsoft withholds standard installs and dictates that everyone goes towards the cloud (Office320 or something?). Then LibreOffice (and partners) could end up standing as a fierce market leader.

I don't think so, because in-browser is the currently favoured idiom and as far as I'm aware, LibreOffice doesn't really have an offering in that domain yet. It's Google or Microsoft.

Then again, one of my offspring is required to use Word by the college. They have both online and local versions, which is sort of good because it means it's possible to WfH without installing Office at home.

Unfortunately, one of the courses insists on a particular quoting / citation format that simply doesn't work in the online version of Word! Assignments can be written at home, but then have to be embellished at college on a locally-installed copy.

No, LibreOffice can't do it either - or at least, not in a way which then loads properly into Word and is acceptable to the course tutor.

M.

It's the Schleswig-Holstein Question 2.0

Worth pointing out that Munich did do it in a particularly dumb way. IIRC they ignored just getting SUSE and insisted on doing their own rollout from scratch

You mean they used something tailored to their requirements.

> The Register contacted Microsoft for its take on the plans and will update should the Windows maker respond.

The MS is busy bribing the officials so the reply might be a bit delayed.

Expect to see Microsoft open a big office in Kiel.

so that the locals can see the joy... no make that the deep joy in using Microsoft Office.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic but I'm proudly MS free (yay!) since Sept 2016.

Well I hope they are successful and that others follow them, then we can apply schadenfreude to

Redmond.

Seems like a lot of effort to achieve zero savings. Who's getting the money? The advisors?

To be fair, that's going to be zero savings over the first 5 years or so, and probably mostly because you already own the VLK's.

The saving would be in not having to buy licenses in the future.

Frankly, just knocking off the low hanging fruit (~80% of the workforce) and then buying a full copy of Microsoft office for the remaining 20% who are determined not to switch would deliver a quite impressive saving in it's own right while removing any reason for complaint in most cases.

"Seems like a lot of effort to achieve zero savings."

It^s stated in teh article that that is exactly what is expected. The advantage isn't in cash savings, it's technology independence, and future-proofing.

I wouldn't be surprised that the motivation really isn't to save money. It's quite possibly a not entirely unjustified fear that at some future time their operations could be hostage to the whims of MS management. Potentially, MS could increase their subscription fees by 35% a year every year for 20 years, and those users who are locked in would have no choice other than to pay up.

But MS wouldn't do that? Haven't dealt with many MBA equipped beancounters have we?

I'm guessing, but it appears to me that local and regional governments do an awful lot of stuff that may be difficult in some cases to do well with the generalized tools in office packages. Birth and Death records and producing the corresponding certificates on demand. Land titles and zoning restrictions and zoning variances. Police records. Probably medical data subject to complex access rules. Library catalogs perhaps. Maybe lists of library cards and expiration dates. Dog licenses. Canine rabies shot certificates. Tax information. Property ownership data. I actually looked at the latter once for some project of my esteemed spouse's. It's public record information here in Vermont. The property locations and valuations were orderly. But man-oh-man was there peculiar stuff in a few of the owner and owner address fields. The property is jointly owned by several trusts with multiple addresses in multiple countries?

My guess is that sort of stuff they want to do in OS independent environments -- browsers apparently.

My take is that becoming OS independent is possibly feasible. And it's probably a good idea. But it will not be easy. And they will be lucky if they can do it at current budget levels.

Given the increasing rates of phone-home features in Microsoft products it's really no wonder that foreign government departments are considering the alternatives. Or maybe they're fine with that and this is a negotiating tactic.

I switched three years ago and overall it's not been too bad. Most of my MS use was Excel and the odd mega-report in Word with full outlining, contents, footnotes, etc; I don't do Powerpoint. My main concern was Excel macros, but they came across OK with no tweaking other than installing Java. The main pain was, as expected, unfamiliarity and finding commands. Page setup and formatting for printing is odd, but that's probably more to do with 20 odd years of MS usage rather than LibreOffice, and I'm just about OK with it. The most annoying thing is that files open in random sized windows and the LibreOffice view is that this is the OS fault, not theirs, in spite of it not happening with any other programmes, but I can live with it.

But for a large organization spread over a number of offices I can see that there will be problems. Most people only use a tiny %age of Office's capabilities and their usage is burned into muscle memory* so teaching them new stuff is hard. The biggest threat to a change like this is when the big boss can't get his paper copy of the presentation because his admin can't work out how to print it and he has to head off to the airport without it - fuming. They need to get a load of people trained as local experts and someone needs to go through all the stuff that the high-paid help depends on and make sure it runs without a hitch. In the meantime I'm sure, as others have posted, that MS will be glad handling all the movers and shakers in the area to make this go away.

* e.g. a dusty part of my brain is still full of slash commands like /wcws to set the width of columns in the spreadsheet programme I used in the early 90s. I can't remember the programme - it was pre-wysiwyg - but my brain and fingers can still remember the commands!

"Most people only use a tiny %age of Office's capabilities and their usage is burned into muscle memory"

Why do you think MS changed the UI to the ribbon? Once they'd changed the file formats to something approximating to a public standard they couldn't keep shuffling it about the way they did with .doc etc.

Yeah, but in Schleswig-Holstein they already have been using LibreOffice on Windows for two years to see whether it will work and will be good enough for what they do, and the result was that it does and it is. Only after that, they also decided to go all the way and move to Linux, too.

I once worked for a company that was bought by a multi-national and after about a year a new edict came down from headquarters that the new corporate standard was everything had to be Microsoft because they had negotiated a licensing deal with them to save money.

We had been using Wordperfect and Lotus 123 (this was obviously a while ago). The change was universally unpopular but nobody in a position to make decisions cared whether anyone on the receiving end of things like it or not. Anybody who couldn't adapt could always be replaced.

There was some moaning about how MS Word and Excel were crap and abysmally slow compared to WordPerfect and Lotus 123, but most people just shrugged and got on with it. After a couple of weeks nearly everybody had gotten over it and found out where the features they used were and life continued on as before. There were no changes in the amount of work you were expected to get done during the transition, so if you had any trouble you were expected to just work harder or longer.

The only department who had any serious issues were the bean counters. They had had a consultant construct a series of complicated Lotus 123 macros and linked spreadsheets to do some part of their bean counting and they didn't know how to port that over to MS Excel. The solution to that was the IT department gave them the business card of a consultant who did the same sort of thing for MS Excel and told them "your spreadsheets - your problems".

In the grand scheme of things the change wasn't a big deal. Most big companies at the time also made the switch and it wasn't considered a big deal for them either.

I've also used LibreOffice and I would say that changing from MS Word and Excel to the LibreOffice equivalents is easier than switching from WordPerfect and Lotus 123 to MS Word and Excel. This sort of change isn't going to be a problem unless someone is very determined to make it a problem.

RE: "Most people only use a tiny %age of Office's capabilities so teaching them new stuff is hard."

An individual may only use, say, 5% of features. A different user may use a different 5% of features. The larger the company, the more individuals there are, the greater the percentage of features being used - and the greater the amount of support needed. If only it were simple.

People complain about this and yet MS changes UIs for its OS regularly and has also changed the UI for Office. The fact that this just seems to be accepted in Microsoft shops while resisting changing to something else can only be attributed to Stockholm Syndrome.

This is sensible as it then does not matter what is on the desktop as long as the web browser is reasonably modern. Most business applications are, essentially, form filling - interactivity can be done with Javascript.

Harder applications are graphical ones as they can need a lot of bandwidth and low latency. Word processors are common graphical applications, so the use of Libreoffice, being run locally, is sensible.

They will prob not reach 100% as a few programs will only be available on Windows or macOS - but a few do not matter.

Working just from memory here.

Munich reported a very high degree of success, > 90% replacement. Then an incoming mayor demanded his Outlook or nothing.

I think I read somewhere that they were changing direction again once the fanboi was out of office.

Can't be arsed to chase up the citations though.

If anyone insists on Outlook, then OWA is the easy solution. Or install it on their phone / tablet.

Nothing wrong with Open Source office products. They fix many issues, except the ones involving users.

One day, the MS cloud will go down for a week or so and the move back to on-prem will begin.

I doubt it, suit wearers aren't good at that whole 'learning from experience' thing. Otherwise all MS' previous 'issues' would have put them out of business.

What happened in Munich was that Microsoft offered to move their EU headquarters to Munich if the city switched back to Microsoft products. A new mayor agreed to the deal and then used it to promote himself as having brought jobs to the city. That's pretty much all there was to it.

If one community manages to free itself from the shackles of MS, they know many more will follow.

The countless billions European governments are paying to MS is waisted taxpayer money.

The costs for MS are brutal, a bare W20XX servers costs like over $ 4000,- just for the right to login with two people.

It won't be just the users which have to adjust, also the software used for administration and papers for citizens might be impacted.

So either it is a publicity stunt to reduce their 8 digit bill from MS or some political opponent will receive massive donations from MS to win the next elections.

A Windows Server 2022 Standard licence costs £600 and allows you to run Hyper-V and 2 VMs, hence is about £300 per instance. Did $4,000 come out of the "random numbers I made up to prove my point" bucket?

I did wonder if the relativity high spec requirements for Windows 11 would trigger some companies to a Linux distribution. While my newer PC's can move to W11 with no problems I have a perfectly serviceable PC which can't. As the program I need has a Linux equivalent it was a no-brainer to put Mint on it.

Although its up and running now it was still a steep learning curve to get it setup as I wanted.

The good news is that what you learned stays relevant longer.

The main desktops probably shuffle their UIs less than MS, but when they do it isn't compulsory. Don't like what Gnome or KDE think is cool this week? There's always somebody who agrees with you and forks the old version.

The issues I had were on the with the original install. The PC in question has a SSD and a collection of old HD's. Trying to set these up as I wanted was the hard bit. A lot of searches and three installs later I had the setup I wanted. Next was identifying what the command line utilities I needed were and what flags and arguments to use to get the desired outcomes was shall we say interesting.

I cut my teeth (as it were) on VAX VMS. Even today the DCL command line environment from VMS seems futuristic compared Linux, Windows and anything else I have looked at.