We love plucky underdogs, and Lotus SmartSuite is certainly one of them--there's no question that this suite has slipped below the radar.
Is it out-of-date? Or has Microsoft Office just eclipsed a worthwhile package? Even though SmartSuite lacks the advanced features you'll find in Microsoft Office, that's precisely why more than just devotees of Lotus Notes, the groupware giant tied to SmartSuite, should seek it out.
Lotus SmartSuite is the cheapest and simplest commercial suite around. It's a good choice for anyone who wants to go back to the basics and save a little cash.
SmartSuite includes the usual suite suspects: a word processor (WordPro), a spreadsheet (1-2-3), a presentation maker (Freelance Graphics), a personal information manager (Organizer), and a database (Approach).
But, unlike Corel WordPerfect Office and all but the most expensive edition of Microsoft Office XP, SmartSuite tosses in an HTML editor called FastSite. FastSite is good enough only to build basic sites from SmartSuite docs, but it's a nice extra nonetheless.
SmartSuite will disappoint folks looking for such groundbreaking features as Office XP's Smart Tags, built-in tags that anticipate and guide your work flow; Task Panes, frames that hold tools you frequently use; and the extensive scripting support that WordPerfect offers developers.
But sometimes an old standby is precisely what you need. With an easy-to-use word processor, an excellent PIM, and some of the most advanced document-tracking features around, SmartSuite is an intelligent move if you don't need the advanced Web integration and collaboration of, say, WordPerfect.
SmartSuite's price tag is another big plus. At about AU$352, it's the cheapest of the big three productivity collections. (The only cheaper suite is StarOffice 5.2, a free 63MB download.) The suite also offers sweet salvation for Windows 95 users left in the cold by Microsoft's Office XP, which works only on version 98 or higher. SmartSuite, on the other hand, runs on Windows 95, 98, NT, and 2000.
Although version 9.6 doesn't explicitly support Windows XP, we ran it on both XP Home and Pro with hardly a hiccup. The only really annoying glitch we found is that the Approach database won't print tables properly from Windows XP. (Lotus says that it will release an XP-capable edition late this year.)
Right off the bat, you get the benefit of SmartSuite 9.6's biggest improvement over its immediate predecessor: you can install this suite on Windows 2000 and XP. Installation itself goes a lot more smoothly now that SmartSuite uses Windows Installer to do the job.
It lets you pick and choose which applications and components to install, just as you can when you install Office XP or WordPerfect Office 2002. You won't need as much drive space to install the package, either: SmartSuite eats up only 150MB or so for a default installation; that's half as much as WordPerfect and about 60 percent as much as Office XP.
Lotus SmartCenter, a customisable toolbar that sits at the top or bottom edge of the desktop, is a prime example of this suite's ingenious simplicity. SmartCenter is made up of drawers, pop-up menus that launch the suite's applications and favourite files, as well as your contact list, calendar, reminders, Web stock quotes, weather reports, and reference works. The SmartCenter is definitely retro-Microsoft Office ditched something similar years ago-but still very handy.
Don't think that SmartSuite is strictly bare bones, however. It packs in some savvy tools. For instance, IBM's ViaVoice, a CNET Editors' Choice, integrates with SmartSuite's WordPro word processor and its 1-2-3 spreadsheet to let you dictate documents and fill in worksheet cells. Plus, ViaVoice is precise. In a contest between Microsoft Word 2002 and Word 2002 and WordPro, for example, WordPro's dictation accuracy comes in five to eight percent higher.
Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition 9.6
Company: Lotus Australia
Price: AU$352
Phone: 13 24 26 (ask for software info)
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