The usual trend is to see cities adopt open source software and renounce the use of proprietary solutions, but in the city of Berlin things are moving in the opposite direction.

City authorities are talking about ditching the old OpenOffice suite for Microsoft Office because they think it will help them better interact with other agencies of the federal government. Their predicament is understandable because the city is using a very old edition of OpenOffice, which dates back to 2010.

A few years ago, the OpenOffice suite was the only one complex enough to take on such a big task, of handling the documents for the administration of an entire city. Things evolved a lot since then, but OpenOffice did not. In fact, a fork developed from OpenOffice is now much more powerful and it's already integrated in numerous operating systems and used by cities around the world. Users know it under the name of LibreOffice.

Because the administration is using such an old version of the software, city employees have experienced many problems with the suite. The lack of support in Germany for open formats has pushed Berlin towards the adoption of a software solution that would end this issue. A spokesman for the Senate Department of Finances in Berlin (Senatsverwaltung für Finanzen in Berlin) tells Golem.de that the city is making the switch to Microsoft Office, although it's not clear what version will be adopted.

Over 6000 PCs will now run Microsoft Office

It's difficult to say what the steps that prompted the city officials to make this decision were. It might just as well be the fact that documents created with OpenOffice 3.2 can't be opened by people with newer or proprietary software, or vice versa.

The fact of the matter is that LibreOffice, a much newer and modern office suite open source solution, can do all these things. It's already used in cities around the world, so others don't seem to have the same problems as Berlin. From what we can gather from the Golem.de report, the switch to Microsoft Office is already happening and it should be finished by the end of 2015.

A much bigger issue is the lack of intervention from the German government, which has yet to implement or regulate the use of open source formats in its own branches. Things would be much simpler if everyone used a single kind of file format that can be read by both proprietary and open source software.