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Contents 
Introduction
Testing Compatability
Evermore Integrated Office
Lotus SmartSuite
Microsoft Office
StarOffice/OpenOffice
WordPerfect Office
Specifications
Final words
Editor's choice
About RMIT |
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These two packages can be easily discussed together. In some ways it wouldn't be unreasonable to say that OpenOffice is to StarOffice as MS Office (Educational) is to MS Office (Professional). OpenOffice has no free incident support and no built-in database. It comes with a slightly limited version of Software AG's database, Adabas. What's more, basic database functions can be applied to data in spreadsheets.
OpenOffice.org is a somewhat experimental application (note that v.1.1.4 is the latest stable version of OpenOffice) and has certain features not present in StarOffice -- such as more languages/localisations (45 languages, compared with 35 for MS Office and 11 for StarOffice). T he inclusion of a fairly powerful drawing application makes these products very worthy of consideration -- as does the low price.
Overall these two products have a richness and depth of features which make them quite comparable with their costly competitors -- the main failing here is the lack of long-term, individual customer support via e-mail or phone.
User files are compressed, and thus may be a third of the size of their Microsoft equivalents (depending on document size and content), but this does result in slight delays with loading and saving. Files can be readily converted to Microsoft formats with high compatibility between products. Both products operate under Windows, Solaris and Linux; only OpenOffice supports Mac OS X at this stage. Both products are frugal with regard to RAM usage.
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Not a bad balanced review. What about all the advanced features like IRM, shared workspace with SharePoint Services, Integration with backend systems etc This is the true differentiation for users who want to do more than change fonts and add italics to a document. Word processing is hard to differntiate, but you ask a very advanced spreadsheet user what really works for them.