Is simultaneous editing really that important? Especially in a government context? My experience with older office workers is that all of them use ancient, offline versions of Word anyway...
Not all office workers are old. Some are young and want to use modern collaboration tools. Even government workers. I think real-time collaborative editing is a chicken-and-egg. You don't know you need it until you start using it. I'm using this often in meetings where the participants all work on the same document, usually some notes/memo or spreadsheet. But I agree that for the note taking use case, a full-blown word processor is not necessary.