Sun's free StarOffice 6.0 offers features that could draw firms away from Microsoft applications, especially in the face of Microsoft's potentially costly new licensing schemes.
Sun Microsystems's free StarOffice suite might not totally displace Microsoft Office in the enterprise, but our tests of the beta version of the office suite show it could undermine Microsoft's dominance.
StarOffice has the user interface and file format compatibility to enable it to coexist with Microsoft Office. Its cross-platform support and ingenious use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) will benefit firms in wide-scale deployments.
New features aside, the fact that StarOffice is free might make companies consider it as an option, especially in the face of Microsoft's potentially expensive new licensing schemes.
We recommend that IT administrators download the StarOffice 6.0 beta and evaluate it to ensure that it's compatible with their existing spreadsheet, word processing and presentation files.
StarOffice 6.0 runs on Windows 9x, Millennium Edition, NT, 2000 and XP. StarOffice is also available for Linux kernel version 2.2.13 or higher and Solaris 7 or later, and here it has a major competitive advantage, particularly for sites supporting Sun or Linux workstations for computer-aided design (CAD) or software development tasks.
On the downside, StarOffice still lacks support for Mac OS, which is often the most common non-Windows operating system on corporate desktops -- and Mac OS is a platform that Microsoft's Office does support.
The most promising part of StarOffice is its new XML-based file format. This format, which is openly documented and freely available under the GNU General Public Licence, consists of a set of XML files that together lay out the content, layout, metadata, and embedded graphics and objects of an office document.
The XML file sets that make up a StarOffice document -- one of our test documents consisted of five such files -- are grouped together within a single compressed file. In addition to insulating firms from future changes to proprietary Microsoft file formats, a set of open file formats should make it possible for software developers to use document files in new and more interesting ways.
StarOffice's Writer, Calc and Impress applications are the suite's word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools, respectively. In our compatibility tests, StarOffice reliably rendered the formatting, styles and calculations from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that we opened.
However, we found that some tool-bar macros failed to come across, and Writer replaced Word's Smart Quotes and ellipses with the letter z. We hope that the Smart Quote problem will be solved in the release version of StarOffice due in the first half of next year, but we expect that sites will have to rewrite tool-bar macros for StarOffice.
We found that Writer was much faster than Word when working with very large documents. For example, a 3M file containing the entire text of War and Peace caused Word 2002 to slow to a crawl, but quickly opened and was ready to edit in StarOffice's Writer.
The most maligned element of previous versions of StarOffice was the integrated desktop encapsulating all the applications. The desktop was crudely designed and imposed a significant performance overhead. In our tests, StarOffice 6.0 behaved much better, and applications appeared and operated individually.
StarOffice 6.0 beta
Company: Sun Microsystems
Price: Free download subject to GNU General Public License agreement
Distributor: Sun Microsystems
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