Re: [school-discuss] StarOffice in Edu.

[Cameron Miller <cdmiller@adams.edu>]

At our little state college it appears to be laziness, ignorance, and 
some valid pragmatism.

Some of our educators have made the fallacious claim that they need to 
teach MS Office because "it is what the students will encounter".  This 
argument has been challenged and defeat acknowledged.

On the staff side, the number of custom applications has been cited, 
(mail merges, access databases).  So realistically, the change there 
will be fairly difficult and time consuming.  Time to get to work.

So it's going to be a slow long struggle introducing OO here, but it is 
already starting to happen.

Step 1, make OO available alongside other office software, in student 
labs and on faculty and staff desktops.

Step 2, start moving some popular multi user access database apps to a 
real database server, as part of our security policy project.

Step 3, Start vocalizing cost savings as d-day for MS licensing 
agreements comes around.

etc..

If it's any comfort, our local High School has a new administrator who 
is competent and will certainly be introducing OO/SO and other desktop 
open source and free software over the next couple of years.

- cameron

Christopher Reed wrote:
> I read today in a release on zdnet "Sun expands StarOffice giveway" (see link 
> below) that Microsoft has 90% of the office suite market in Edu. 
> 
> I'm curious why a free product like StarOffice is not more prevalent in 
> education. Is it an issue of support? Usability? Laziness (people don't want 
> to switch ffrom MS Office)? Or other?
> 
> I appreciate your thoughts.
> 
> Chris 
> 
> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-09-17-009-26-NW-SW-PB
> 
> 

-- 
- cameron miller
- UNIX Systems Administrator
- Outhouse Attendant
- http://portal.adams.edu/outhouse/
- cdmiller@adams.edu