Question:
I'd love to get some info on the need in schools for MAR MS Office licensing. It turns out that this is a good time for us to get a request in for it.
Here's the back story. At the ICRS conference in Washington DC in March, many Community MAR refurbishers (by the way 'Community MAR' is our new name) provided feedback that there was demand for Office from schools. As you probably know schools, and other educational establishments, are Eligible Recipients of Community MAR Licenses but only for Windows. When Microsoft Office was in the program, educational establishments were not eligible for MAR Office.
Microsoft is looking at adding an office application back in to Community MAR and interested to hear of any specific examples of schools that received MAR Windows and wanted or needed MAR Office as well. What did they do given that it wasn't available? Did they use other Microsoft programs for Education, for example? If you have examples including geographic area or name of school or district and the number of MAR Windows licenses you've supplied, I would be happy to pass that info along.
Answer:
Interesting thread MSOffice vs Open Office. I've learned to not get into this particular debate, since "afficianos" of one brand over another are hard to persuade of another's view.
After years in the trenches in the SEEDS program, and my current experience with community labs, I would make the observation that this issue gets a lot more attention from folks like us and from educators than it does from end users.
Most end users of either package have only superficial skills, and with a little training can use either package with good results. I taught in adult education for over thirty years, and have developed the opinion that we should be equipping our clients for ongoing learning, not just memorizing where all the buttons are.
There is probably as much difference between the various versions of MSOffice as there is between MSOffice and Open Office. I've had good results with Ubuntu Linux/ OpenOffice et. al. but then I'm dealing with end users and not all the rest of us experts
