I thought it would be useful to compare the interim Glow/Microsoft Office 365 solution with the work which has been going on with Glew recently. This comparison is based on the information available in public domain from Education Scotland, Microsoft and Google.
| Glow(2012-2013)/Microsoft 365 | Glew/Google Apps |
| Authentication Shibboleth Authentication |
Authentication Shibboleth Authentication SAML2.0 OpenID(coming soon integration with Facebook/Twitter IDs) |
| Launchpad RM Unify (with user apps store in development) |
Glew Apps Glew Service Launchpad (with 40+ user apps in library and more in development, and soon a user accessible API to develop your own apps). |
| Email Exchange online with full mobile experience – email, calendar, web-app, 25Gb email storage per user |
Email Gmail with full Exchange mobile functionality, 25Gb per user. Dedicated mobile apps Android. |
| Communication Lync online service – peer to peer video coms, Presence and IM, integration with Exchange and Sharepoint online, usable on mobile devices |
Communication Google Talk – peer-to-peer video, chat, presence and IM, fully integrated with Gmail contacts and Drive. Supported on iOS and Android.Google Hangouts/Hangouts on Air |
| Storage Sharepoint online – 512Mb personal plus 512Mb pooled data storage |
Storage Google Drive – 5Gb per user of storage Unlimited Google Docs storage |
| Productivity Suite Office Web Apps – online browser based versions of the familiar MS Office suite including Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. This will remove the requirement to have an underlying MS Office installation on a device, however when the apps are on the client, they will work together. |
Productivity Suite Google Docs – (Wordprocessor, Spreadsheet, Presentations, Forms, Drawings, Google Script automation) support for MS Office document formats. Mobile support and dedicated mobile apps.Google Apps Script to allow automation of tasks. |
| Blogging/Wiki Blogging and Wiki tools with social networking integration (in Sharepoint) |
Blogging/Wiki WordPress Blogs and seprate ePortfolio WordPress Blogs.MediaWiki (software used to run Wikipedia). |
| Collaboration Powerful document collaboration including multi-user editing facilities (but not in browser currently, requires desktop application – Office 2010+) |
Collaboration Realtime collaboration/editing of documents enabled in browser, commenting, sharing and notifications of activity via email. |
| VLE SharePoint based VLE system in development. |
VLE Moodle (worldclass opensource VLE as used by OpenUniversity, SQA Academy and many more). Integrated with Google Apps to provide learning repository. |
| Forums No discussion forums |
Forums Google groups providing online and email discussion groups. |
| Survey Tool No Survey tool |
Survey Tool Opensource LimeSurvey tool offering similar functions as SurveyMonkey. |
| ePortfolio Tool No dedicated ePortfolio tool / blogs in Sharepoint |
ePortfolio Tool Mahara ePortfolio software and dedicated WordPress ePortfolio blogs. |
| Additional Services Additional Nationally procured content. |
Additional Services Glew+ services accessible using Glew OpenId.- FlickR, Pixton, Wallwisher, Screener, GoAnimate and many more. |
John
Glew is looking good Charlie, what is slightly depressing is that the best we can hope for is to go from glow 1 to 1.5 to glew. To many changes will not encourage reluctant users. For example looks like glow blogs might be migrated to some sharepoint solution, then if we are lucky back wp in glew
I am too old for this number of changes;-)