[libreoffice-marketing] Re: Indian academic institutions forced to use MS Office

Le 26/04/13 06:14 PM, Jean Weber a écrit :

> I agree with Charles that it's mostly a political problem. I also agree with Marc that education 
> sector wants certain features or at least some easy way to do certain things.
>
> One item that has been on my documentation wish list for years is a book (or series of tutorials) 
> aimed specifically and teachers and/or academics, explaining how to do things they frequently want 
> or need to do. Kind of a cookbook approach: here's the task you want to accomplish, and here's how 
> to do it. These days I think video tutorials would be the way to go. Of course, such a project 
> needs a team of people to produce the material: a team that includes people who know the audience 
> and their requirements well. At this time we don't have such a team, and I can't see us being able 
> to put together such a team. If we had some money to pay a few professionals whom I know, to do at 
> least some of the work, then it could happen.
>
> Perhaps this is something I should develop into a costed proposal for consideration in next year's 
> budget.
>
> --Jean

I don't necessarily see it as a political problem, but mostly a 
strategic problem on our part. Our first objective should be to get the 
suite on the list of contenders to the replacement of MSO. The list that 
I posted is not that difficult to accomplish for our group ... except 
for an LTS version which, for us, is a question of our group's ideology, 
and, for educational institutions, it is a question of money. Getting 
competent accredited help also fits in our largest failing.

Look at the list once again and you will find that except for the LTS 
(event despite having very few accredited individuals) we would be well 
placed.there would not be too much work at getting LibreOffice fit for 
mass institutional consumption:

* Getting a clipart solution ... I am already working on an extremely 
simple package version for schools and students. IT staff normally just 
dump the collection on their servers and let students look these up from 
MSO. We should package a large group of cliparts and have it ready for 
download with easy configuration routine to link it to the LibreOffice 
Gallery.

*templates ... teachers would definitely participate in this for free 
... they revel at working on such projects. We would only need to mentor 
groups and teach them templating techniques.

* bibliographic tool Zotero ... means partnering up with the company or 
just going it alone with our own plugin and Zotero server solution. This 
is a must for academic users.

* cloud solutions ... we were running a series of blogs where someone 
was showing solid possibilities, we just need to package and market the 
information the right way.

We are really only 6 items short of being more of a credible contender 
and of those 4 are already achievable.

As for video production, sure we now have the YouTube channel (Drew will 
be passing admin on to us soon), we already have Kannan's group that we 
may be able to use, and, teacher groups are also adept at working on 
some of these. We could run some regional teacher video summer projects 
or even apply for grants from different regional governmental agencies 
who would most likely participate.


Institutions work at a glacial pace and change is extremely difficult. 
Strategic plans are drawn up in 3 or 5 year and sometime 10 year time 
frames. Yes, it is very politicized, but there are ways to cut through 
much of the politics to get LibreOffice moving, but, the fact remains, 
that, first of all, and, most of all, we need to serve up a LibreOffice 
version that simply has a longer shelf-life. MSO does this well and 
capitalizes on it, we need to re-think our strategy to make things work 
for these large environments.

Cheers,

Marc


--
Marc Paré
Marc@MarcPare.com
http://www.parEntreprise.com
parEntreprise.com Supports OpenDocument Formats (ODF)
parEntreprise.com Supports http://www.LibreOffice.org


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