You're talking about business workflows, and that makes sense. But this article is about universities, they have far less Microsoft-specific document editing workflows, compared to established enterprises. At least, that was my experience when I was a part-time teacher at a university - LibreOffice did the job just fine for me. And although other professors used MS Office, none of them did anything fancy (they didn't have any custom VBAs/macros, no disgusting database-like Excel spreadsheets etc) - I can see these people easily switching to the oss options we have today.

Of course, every university and every person is different, but it's not an impossibility unlike businesses.