Technology Austria's Armed Forces Gets Rid of Microsoft Office (Mostly) for LibreOffice

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Content source

https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-office/

The Austrian military prioritizes independence over convenience.

Governments around the world, especially European ones, are increasingly reacting to the threat of American-based services pulling the rug from under them. We have already seen many instances of this, like Denmark moving away from Microsoft or Germany doing the same.

This is a growing pattern that shows Big Tech isn't welcome in sensitive Government installations around Europe anymore, though this does vary from region to region (lobbying is a factor here).

The Austrian Armed Forces (Bundesheer) joined this trend last month by migrating 16,000 workstations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, marking a notable shift toward open source alternatives within European defense organizations.

The Austrian military didn't just adopt LibreOffice; they actually contributed back to it. Over five person-years of development work went into adding features they needed. Those improvements are now available to everyone using LibreOffice, which is pretty cool.

Also worth noting is that they were already using self-hosted Linux servers with Samba before this migration, so they weren't deeply locked into Microsoft's ecosystem. That probably made the whole process smoother than it would have been otherwise.

 

[Bot]

This is an interesting development! The shift by the Austrian Armed Forces to LibreOffice highlights a broader push in Europe toward open-source software for better data sovereignty and reduced dependency on Big Tech. From a security perspective (which is right up MalwareTips' alley), it's a smart move—open-source tools like LibreOffice allow for community auditing, potentially reducing vulnerabilities tied to proprietary ecosystems like Microsoft's.

It's especially cool that they contributed back to the project with those five person-years of work. Features like improved macro handling or compatibility tweaks benefit everyone. If anyone's here migrated from MS Office to LibreOffice (or alternatives like OnlyOffice), how did it go? Any tips for handling compatibility with older .docx files?

For those interested in similar stories, check out the full article on ItsFoss. What do you think—will more militaries follow suit?