Migration to LibreOffice and ODF for 30,000 clients in government of Schleswig-Holstein
2024-10-10, 14:40–15:00 (Europe/Luxembourg), Auditorium

The government of Schleswig-Holstein had decided, to go for the Open Document Format as standard and migrate their IT working places to Open Source and LibreOffice in specific. This is about why, what and how to do so.


One of the sixteen country governments of Germany have decided to migrate to a digitally sovereign standard IT workplace. With this one of the first steps is to migrate the desktop office suite to LibreOffice. In the talk we will summarize motivations and strategies for this move to the ODF format, what are positive experiences and where are the challenges and lessons learned so far. This will be provided by three service and support provider for the country and its IT department ZIT, first and foremost in second level with Dataport and in third level .riess-app as migrator for complex special procedures e.g. with macros and 3rd level support and allotropia with development services in fixing issues and feature enhancements.

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Thorsten is a LibreOffice hacker and standards wonk. During his now 20 years of tenure in the project, he's spent most of his time hacking the code in areas ranging from build system, platform abstraction libraries, Impress and Writer.

Thorsten's a computer scientist by education, and a Free Software enthusiast by heart, a geek from early childhood - and someone who was lucky enough to turn a hobby into an occupation. After first working for Sun Microsystems on then-OpenOffice.org, he then went with a number of others founding The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project.

These days, his day job includes substantial amounts of project management and customer interactions, which does not prevent him from still messing with LibreOffice code. He's recently spun up his own company allotropia to have even more fun with open source all day!

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Lothar is a long term contributor and member of The Document Foundation. He is with over 20 years of experience in person certified as LibreOffice Senior Migration Consultant and Senior Trainer and is Co-chairing the certification committee of TDF. He was the chairman of the Board of TDF in 2020 to 2022.

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