Austrian Armed Forces replacing Microsoft Office with LibreOffice

The welcome screen of open-source office software LibreOffice, which the Austrian Armed Forces announced in September 2025 it was introducing across its branches. (LibreOffice)

The Austrian Armed Forces (Bundesheer) said in late September that by the end of 2025 it will migrate 16,000 user workstations throughout all branches from Microsoft Office to the LibreOffice open-source suite.

The Bundesheer's Directorate 6, responsible for information technology (IT) and cyber, told Janes in October that while LibreOffice is cheaper than buying Microsoft licences, the primary reason for the move was not to save money but to strengthen digital sovereignty. According to Directorate 6's Michael Hillebrand, “the main aim was to maintain the independence of our own IT infrastructure and to ensure that sensitive data is only processed internally. Processing further in external cloud services was out of the question for the military, ensuring that the armed forces – an organisation that is there to function when everything else is failing – remain operational even in crisis situations and can fall back on software that is under our own control.”

Hillebrand added, “About five years ago, it became apparent that Microsoft was increasingly moving its Office 2016 Professional applications to the cloud, a growing problem because it creates a dependency on external providers and security-relevant data can no longer remain under one's own control. Since then, open source was often the subject of discussions because it was supposedly free. But again, this was not the main reason.”