The German state pioneering digital sovereignty | Euractiv
www.euractiv.com
The northern region of Schleswig-Holstein is well on its way to moving its public administration from Microsoft software to open source alternatives

Archived

Schleswig-Holstein only has about 3 million inhabitants, and is far from the richest part of Germany, but for the past several years it’s been following an ambitious strategy to wean itself off Big Tech’s software.

This means switching the workplaces of 30,000 civil servants – a headcount roughly comparable to the European Commission – from Microsoft Office software to open alternatives.

In an interview with Euractiv, digital minister Dirk Schrödter said his state is well on the way to achieving this goal. After getting started last March, Schleswig-Holstein is set to reduce the number of Office licences needed for administration by more than two-thirds by the end of this month, he told us.

[…]

The administration will still need a few Office licences to communicate with other regions and Germany’s federal tax administration, according to Schrödter. But the goal is to be able to get rid of all but a very few Microsoft Office licences by 2029.

Instead of sticking with Word and Powerpoint, the state’s civil servants are migrating to LibreOffice. Emails will go through Open Xchange and Thunderbird, rather than Microsoft’s Outlook, and documents will be edited collaboratively via Nextcloud, not Sharepoint.

The migration goes beyond desktop programmes, too. Schleswig-Holstein is running a Linux pilot to replace Windows itself. Currently around 150 people are testing the new operating system, including the digital minister.

[…]

A major focus for the shift is on making the change seamless. “It’s supposed to change as little as possible,” Schrödter said.

Civil servants will have to get used to new desktop icons and tools that are designed slightly differently, but – in theory – the alternatives should be just as comfortable to use.

But like every tech migration, this one is not going off without some pain. Just last week, an association of judges called for a return to Outlook, saying that outages were plaguing civil servants’ new email clients.

While the alternative software that Schleswig-Holstein is adopting is openly available, a lot of work needs to be done to integrate it with the needs of public administration. The region is mostly handing this work to existing contractors, just with new provisions for supporting open document formats.

[…]

  • jjpamsterdam@feddit.orgEnglish
    111·
    1 day ago

    I’ve read about this initiative a few times and only time will tell if it really works or if it will be another Lumix disaster. However, if you don’t try you’re always going to fail, so I applaud their courage. I hope more administrative functions can make this switch in the upcoming years. It’s certainly a better prospect to pay a few more admins and support staff to keep open source software running well than paying Microsoft millions just for a few licenses.

    • Melchior@feddit.orgEnglish
      12·
      1 day ago

      Lumix was hardly a disaster. From a technical and organizational level it worked. It was only rolled back due to stupid politicans.

      • randomname@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
        9·
        1 day ago

        Well, I get your point (and agree), but it wasn’t likely just politicians.

        There is a good write-up about about FOSS and decentralization, and how to attack them. The author knows the ‘Limux’ venture first hand:

        When alternatives (OpenOffice then LibreOffice) became good enough at opening doc/xls/ppt formats, Microsoft released a new format that they called “open and standardised”. The format was, on purpose, very complicated (20.000 pages of specifications!) and, most importantly, wrong. Yes, some bugs were introduced in the specification meaning that a software implementing the full OOXML format would behave differently than Microsoft Office.

        Those bugs, together with political lobbying, were one of the reasons that pushed the city of Munich to revert its Linux migration. So yes, the strategy works well. Today, docx, xlsx and pptx are still the norms because of that. Source: I was there, indirectly paid by the city of Munich to make LibreOffice OOXML’s rendering closer to Microsoft’s instead of following the specifications.

        But time have changed since the early 2000s, and the guys in Schleswig-Holstein appear to have a clear plan and know what they are doing. And they are not the only ones, hopefully.

        @[email protected]

      • jjpamsterdam@feddit.orgEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Exactly, a disaster insofar as it went nowhere and tarnished the reputation of open source alternatives through no fault of their own for a wider audience.