[libreoffice-marketing] Who's the competition? [was: 21st Educational...]

On 3/11/2011 4:36 PM, drew wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-03-11 at 19:22 -0500, webmaster for Kracked Press
> Productions wrote:
> > On 03/11/2011 07:04 PM, drew wrote:
> > or marketing group.  Since they have several college/universities in the
> > Ithaca area.
> > Cornell is a major player in status for New York State Colleges.  A lot
> > of major research
> > partners with industries at Cornell.
> Actually from what I can see MSO is not the competitor any longer, not
> in the USA and not in Education - it is Google Docs.
Yup.  Google Apps (which includes Docs) and, I'd argue to a lesser 
extent, Microsoft Live.

I just want to re-emphasize Drew's assertion and go  a step further.  
The relative importance of office suites is in flux.  In terms of 
importance, collaboration is ascendent.  This means having, not only 
productivity tools but, document management (i.e. versioning) and 
calendaring.

For the last 4 or 5 years, MS' lunch has been eaten in the higher 
education space, not by other applications but by Google Apps.  And this 
is only because Google is the furthest along in recognizing the tools 
important to collaboration.  MS is late to the party but, it'd be 
wishful thinking to believe they won't stay & fight.

 I live & work in the San Francisco Peninsula.  The community college 
system in San Mateo County hands out branded gmail & apps to every one 
of their students, faculty & admins.  That's over 25,000 students & 
what, maybe another 5,000 staff across three campuses.  Students 
collaborate on projects, receive and send homework, schedule and synch 
their schedules.  A lot of them don't bother to pack around a computing 
device larger than their mobile phone.  They use their lappies at home 
and desktops "in the lab."  It doesn't matter because it's all on their 
school-branded cloud serviced by Google.

Another example:  A small group w/in a County agency is staffed by 
volunteers (me included).  Of course, with a volunteer staff the 
organization suffered from regular turnover and bizarre scheduling 
requirements.  The group needed collaboration tools: document management 
and group calendaring.  No IT budget and a very restrictive (and old) IT 
policy, i.e. nothing gets installed that isn't on the blessed list.   We 
fired up a domain, handed it over to Google and now the organization is 
running better than it ever has.  Higher quality services, fewer 
mistakes, the whole enchilada.

The company I work for is spread out.  It lives & breathes 
collaboration.  Right now, it's laboring in part because our IT works in 
centralized fashion.  They also have a "blessed list" and a process with 
many checks and balances.  It blunts our effectiveness.  I didn't call 
for a roll-out of (then) OpenOffice because that was only going to solve 
one of our secondary problems concerning collaboration.  I showed my 
boss Google Apps and now that's a possibility.

Google's productivity suite is too basic for our needs regarding text 
editing and spreadsheets.  But they're getting better.  What we are 
considering now is; whether the other collaboration tools (email, 
calendaring, storage) justify enrolling in Google Apps now.  I even 
tried an OOo add-on which makes it easy to down- and up-load doc to 
Google storage right from the app.  Didn't work too well though but, 
that effort does point in the right direction.

If you've read this far, I apologize for the heft of the post but, I 
promise to end it soon.

All of this is why, when I first posted to this list, I asked about a 
roadmap.  I think LibreOffice is a quality application which needs to 
become a quality Collaboration suite.  I don't know what that looks 
like.  But that's how people are working today, which is why Google & MS 
are moving in this direction.

fwiw,
-Craig

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