Rough Draft - Group 2 - White Paper

Group 2,

After reviewing your white paper, I'd like to start off by making some observations of things that I liked and thought you did well in your paper.

To start, the overall length of your paper is good. Nice job. Seems like everyone contributed and you have plenty of material. Also, you did a good job of strategically repeating information throughout the paper. That was good. The content of the paper was solid (lots of "meat"), and the language of the paper was pretty good.

Now to some of my observations on things I'd suggest for changes.

Your executive summary did a good job of introducing the paper, and it had strong info. However, it seemed that some of the sentences had content that was out of order. I'd consider revising it so the flow of ideas doesn't jump around so much. Also, Google Docs does much more than just mimic Microsoft word. Having said that, I think your paper's main focus is on Google Docs vs Word, so that might not apply.

The intro was definitely good, although its font is different than the exec. summary. I would make them the same for continuity. It had a very good outline of the paper's topics, and a good flow of ideas. Not much else to be said.

The history section was a bit short, and it didn't have much historical content. You could remedy much of that by simply including some dates (when it was created, how long it's been in beta form, when they expect to go past the beta version, etc.).

Document Collaboration at Biomet was pretty good, too. However, the advantages/disadvantages need to be reformatted to present the information more clearly. Leave some white space between the bulleted points and the text separating them, too. Also, there are definitely more advantages Google Docs offers that you could include. The biggest one that sticks out to me is Google Docs import/export capabilities. It can import all kinds of file formats and it can export in many different formats, too. Again, just a suggestion.

I'll skip a couple sections because they looked good. For the Google Docs Features section, remember this is a white paper, not an instruction manual. There is good info here, but I don't think it belongs in a white paper. Instructions like this were for Project 1. Instead, this section should be about Google Docs capabilities, discussed without technical detail. "Google Docs can import Microsoft Word files, allow them to be edited, and then exported as a PDF." This tells the capability without going into too much technical detail.

And finally, the conclusion section. I'd be careful about making recommendations, as a white paper is not supposed to do that. Instead, maybe offer all the solutions Biomet has. To use Google Docs instead of Word, to not use Google Docs, to use Google Docs in a limited sense at Biomet, etc.

As a general note, I would make sure you cite and list your sources in the paper. This was one of the requirements. Also, there were several wording mistakes or missing words in sentences. I'm sure you had already planned to, but I at least wanted to suggest going back over the paper to make sure no words were missing or misspelled.

I hope this helps a little, and good luck to all of you!

Good job Group #2! I can tell you put a lot of time and effort into this project. I really like how instead of just focusing your white paper on Google Docs, you focused on Google Docs and Microsoft Word. This allowed the reader to compare the two and make an informed decision on which software to use. You have very accurate, detailed, and easy to read information on both. This is important because it provides the reader with enough information to make a correct decision for their company. I think you could improve your white paper by making the paper’s flow stronger. You can tell where the paper was divided up and written by multiple people… which is understandable, but you can make it flow better as a whole. Try organizing your paper by using the same font and size of writing. I would also like to see a stronger conclusion that is more convincing. You all worked too hard on this white paper to end so abruptly. I enjoyed reading your paper and good luck with all your revisions.