You may remember that on Saturday I posted some screenshots demonstrating how simple, coherent and transparent Atlassian’s pricing and licensing mechanism is?
Well, the other discussion that has been very visible in the Yellowsphere over the past 7 days has been around a vendor’s engagement (or lack of it) with the academic community – Universities, further education, schools, home-education etc.
Once again, I am going to fall back on Atlassian as an example of how it could be done… Head over to atlassian.com/classroom:
So what do we have here?
- Obvious focus on academic institutions
- List of references in this area
- Free access to the software – ‘Making our tools freely available to students and teachers is just one small step towards that goal’
- Offer to showcase and to assist these organisations
See, they get it! Wouldn’t this make you want to get more knowledge of this vendor and its products?
So, IBM, here’s the gauntlet thrown down… By the time we discuss this at Lotusphere 2011, how about we have something equally appealing, easy to understand and navigable for institutions that want to learn Lotus software?