Update and correction. On 28 October we reported that Denmark had ended its Collabora pilot and that the project was being treated as a failure. Collabora has since contacted NordiskBil to explain what happened. According to the company, the pilot was not concluded and no verdict was reached on the software.
It was interrupted by a government reorganisation. This article corrects and updates our earlier report.
What Collabora says happened
The pilot began in 2025, when the Danish ministry responsible for digitalisation started looking at alternatives to Microsoft productivity tools as part of its digital sovereignty strategy. According to Collabora, the aim was not to swap one product for another, but to give the administration more freedom of choice and reduce dependency on single providers.
The project was run together with the Danish software company cBrain, whose F2 platform is used across all Danish ministries for case management, communication, document management, compliance and archiving.
Two phases, one early result
The first phase was completed successfully, says Collabora. Collabora Office was integrated with F2, and users could switch between Collabora Office and Microsoft Office when editing documents. The files stayed inside the same government platform and used Microsoft compatible formats.
In the second phase, around forty ministry employees tested Collabora Office in their daily work. Users found functionality and compatibility issues, which Collabora describes as normal for a pilot of this kind. Details of the early problems reached the Danish press in December 2025. Our earlier article listed difficulties with styles, formatting and tracked changes. Collabora does not itemise the issues, but says its senior engineers investigated and resolved the reported tickets, at the company’s own expense.
A reorganisation, not a verdict
In June 2026 the Danish government was reorganised and the Ministry of Digitisation was abolished as a standalone ministry. Its responsibilities and staff moved into a new structure. Collabora says the pilot lost its organisational setting and was put on hold before the planned evaluation could be completed.
To Collabora’s knowledge, no formal assessment of the software’s suitability was completed, and no formal conclusion was reached on the outcome of the pilot. The company stresses that the interruption should not be read as a finished technical evaluation or as a decision that the technology was unsuitable. Its statement does not describe any decision to return to Microsoft Office.
The timeline also differs from our earlier report. Citing the Italian outlet Punto Informatico, we wrote that the project was reportedly shelved in February 2026. Collabora places the interruption in June 2026, after the reorganisation.
What happens next
Collabora says the experience from the pilot is being carried forward through continued activities with other Danish public authorities, again together with cBrain and the F2 platform. The company sees the Danish work as an example of how open source productivity software can be integrated into established government platforms. It adds that the underlying need has not changed, as governments across Europe still want more control over their digital infrastructure.
This account comes from Collabora’s own statement, published on 28 October 2026. NordiskBil will update the story if Danish authorities or cBrain provide further details.
