Austrian military shifts from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice

The Austrian military has replaced Microsoft Office with LibreOffice on some 16,000 computers — that’s around half of their IT systems. It’s free software: open source and no cost. Austria! Full-scale deployment!

Officials are presenting the move as a strategic decision on sovereignty, not a quick money-saving scheme: they hope to prevent sensitive workflows from being at the mercy of foreign cloud giants while decreasing reliance on foreign clouds.

Digital sovereignty comes first in Austria’s military move

Military leaders say the focus is independence: owning the software stack, choosing what to process and when and how to process it, and cutting dependence on overseas vendors. Austria’s ICT and Cyber Defense Department Directorate 6 is clear that critical data will be processed by in-house, auditable code inside transparently implemented security protocols. LibreOffice’s open-source code, and support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF), ensure that goal is met — no more proprietary formats, and looking good even after two decades.

There’s also a regulatory dimension. European privacy laws require stringent controls on the flow of data, and public-sector IT teams are growing increasingly cautious about compliance risk in relation to extraterritorial legislation such as the U.S. CLOUD Act. Favoring open-source on national infrastructure, Austria reduces legal ambiguity and has better control over telemetry, update cadence, and incident response.

How the migration happened across 16,000 Austrian PCs

The deployment took a sequential journey: pilot groups, dual-running with Microsoft Office, and focused education before the wider rollout. Out-of-the-box standard templates have been re-created for LibreOffice and default formats have been changed to ODF, while the conversion filters between old OpenOffice.org format and ODF were heavily optimised for better interoperation. .docx and .xlsx files. Macros and form-heavy workflows — often the most difficult part of a system (to me) — were rewritten using LibreOffice Basic (some Python where I could manage), with business owners accepting my outputs.

Austria didn’t just add software; it invested upstream. Outside developers were hired to beef up features critical for military users — maybe things like more capable slideshow editing, or better handling of pivot tables, or improvements to document fidelity — then contributed those improvements back to the LibreOffice project. That strategy limits future maintenance burden and feeds the larger open-source pool.

Microsoft Office was removed from the base images. There are exceptions for highly specific, narrow uses, such as only needing access to certain modules in Office LTSC, niche Microsoft Access databases, or licensed fonts. Those exemptions are managed, audited, and remain separate from the standard desktop build.

It’s about costs, but officials say it’s also not

On paper, the budget delta is stark. A Microsoft 365 E3 seat retails for approximately $33.75 per user per month; at 16,000 seats that works out to around $6.48 million a year. “LibreOffice is free, but stuff around it isn’t: professional support, training and migration services all cost money.” Austrian officials have not been shy: their main goal is risk reduction — control over updates, data residency, the supply chain — not headline savings. Still, shaving off subscription overhead frees up budget for security hardening, user training, and local support.

Organizations that don’t want to rely on community support for LibreOffice can purchase alternative enterprise support from The Document Foundation, the organization’s key commercial partner, Collabora, etc. Austria’s combination of internal capacity and support from partners is a demonstration of how open-source procurement can give predictable support without forfeiting control.

A broader European realignment toward open source

Austria’s move is part of a broader trend among European public agencies. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is moving to Linux for its government PCs and other technology. FreeBSD is used in France by Gendarmerie Nationale as part of their Linux-and-LibreOffice stack deployed at a large scale. The Open Source Strategy by the European Commission and the Interoperable Europe Act encourage reusable, auditable software in public services, and efforts like Gaia-X hope to secure European sovereignty over cloud data and infrastructure.

The thread that links these efforts together is control: of where data resides, the security posture it inherits, and the cost lifecycle. Open standards such as ODF also benefit cross-border interoperation, a subtle but important consideration for agencies that need to exchange documents with other countries in an entirely reliable manner.

Operational realities and payoffs for Austria’s forces

No migration is frictionless. Complicated spreadsheets with fancy VBA, outdated Access databases, and heavily structured templates usually don’t work. Austria addressed this, accompanied by specific retraining, a governance push towards templates and styles, and plans for compatibility in edge cases. The upside is a desktop that can work entirely offline, with managed updates and fewer obscure dependencies — an advantage in classified computing environments and upon loss of network connection.

Security teams get additional levers: they can inspect source code, reproduce builds, and are able to sandbox integrations better. Over time, that also results in a more predictable risk profile and the ability to adjust tooling to changing mission needs without the need to renegotiate vendor terms.

What Austria’s move signals for European public IT

In adopting LibreOffice, Austria’s military authorities are clearly stating that office productivity now forms part of a nation’s critical infrastructure. It’s not an “anti-Microsoft” choice; it’s a pro-sovereignty, pro-standards decision that maintains only the narrowest mode of compatibility when necessary and prioritizes control everywhere else. Expect more European agencies to emulate this model: open by default, closed by exception, and with a stress on resilience over convenience.