Denmark's digital ministry quietly ended its Collabora pilot, and HN's reason was mail merge
About 40 ministry employees had been testing an open-source Microsoft Office alternative since summer 2025. Computerworld Denmark reports the pilot is over.
The Danish Ministry of Digitalisation dropped the Collabora pilot, delivered by Danish vendor cBrain, without announcing it. The paywalled article does not show the ministry's reason in its visible text.
HN supplied its own: a commenter has tried switching every year just to print adhesive labels.
What was dropped
Computerworld Denmark reported on 20 October that the Ministry of Digitalisation ended a pilot of Collabora, an open-source office suite, as a Microsoft Office replacement. The pilot began in summer 2025 with roughly 40 employees, and the system was supplied by the Danish company cBrain. The ministry made no announcement. The ministry's reasons sit behind the paywall.
The label-printing test
Commenters filled the gap with experience.
"Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software. I will try to do this same exact action" — sanskritical, who runs recurring physical mailings
The action is a mail merge from a spreadsheet onto adhesive label sheets with the manufacturer's template, and by his account it never works the same way. Replies offered workarounds: gLabels, a CSV to a print vendor, or a different pipeline. A blunter reply blamed Microsoft.
"While Microsoft has published a specification of their file formats, the never described how to render them. So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office." — orangesilk
'Pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years'
The cynical read came from pessimizer: European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for two decades, and the first one to do it got a discount that every later one now uses for leverage. Others saw an opening, since software is now cheap to write.
"Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture." — toomuchtodo
The lesson for any team piloting an Office replacement is the one the label printer teaches: test your ugliest recurring document workflow first, because that is where pilots die quietly.
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