On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It seems to me that the major flaw of the software is that it isn't
> cross-platform, which comes as no surprise.  But I feel Microsoft didn't do
> their market research.  While the financial and business sectors are heavily
> reliant on Microsoft servers, American universities, and by extension,
> research libraries, are not.  If they really wanted to make a "commitment to
> support the academic community" as they say on the Zentity website, they
> would have developed it for a platform that the academic community actually
> uses.

This seems like sort of a snotty answer, honestly, and I find three
flaws with it:

1) Research and intellectual output is not exclusive to large,
research university which means repositories should not be exclusive
to ARL libraries
2) There are lots of academic Microsoft shops, esp. at the campus IT
(or departmental IT) level.  It's not beyond reason to think that a
smaller university would prefer the repository be hosted by central IT
(or that the chemistry department or engineering school in a larger
university host their own repository).
3) E-Prints, for example, seems to be making an effort to commodotize
and democratize the repository space a bit by making it as simple as
possible to run an IR.  MS is making this even simpler for places that
already have Windows servers (which is a lot).

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Microsoft, but I just don't
see how Zentity is one of them.

-Ross.