I notice that the Marketing Strategy Plan 2010 has listed as the special needs for Education the following 4 points-
• an Access style database • there is a lot of content and support material for MS-Office and very little for OpenOffice.org • difficulty in network installations on Windows XP • lack of brand awareness, confusion between StarOffice (which is available free under Sun's Educational Licencing scheme28). This list leaves out the requirements of higher Education and Academic and research users. These users will not take up OpenOffice or StarOffice until we provide adequate citation and bibliographic support. Many people in Universities and research Institutes have written to me expressing this sentiment. We are trying to promote OpenOffice in Universities but the student's professors and academic staff would not use it or recommend it because of its poor bibliographic support. My University's IT department distributes OpenOffce for free, but the Academic departments recommend students use Endnotes for bibliographic management. Endnotes only works properly with MS Word. They have purchased a University wide licence and distribute Endnotes for free !. To gain this market we need to compete against Endnotes. Until recently OpenOffice could claim to at least have bibliographic some support whilst MS Word did not have any. The situation is now reversed. Word 2007 has significantly better bibliographic support than OpenOffice. But not better support that that planned for OpenOffice by the Bibliographic project. Given this situation I propose that a fifth dot point be added to this list- • Bibliographic support competitive with commercial products. I raised this in late 2004, and Daniel Carrera asked whether "We Should we mention features in the SMP? I'm thinking that if we include every important feature, we'll end up with a much longer SMP, and it's already 58 pages!" In terms of the higher Education market bibliographic support is not 'feature', it is a strategic requirement. If we do not have it we are not in it. regards David Wilson -- ------------------- David N. Wilson Co-Project Lead for the Bibliographic OpenOffice Project http://bibliographic.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
