Sun Microsystems 's StarOffice might not be ready to totally displace Microsoft 's Office in the enterprise, but eWeek Labs' tests of the StarOffice 6 beta show the suite has the stuff to loosen Micro soft's iron grip on the office productivity market.
StarOffice has the interface familiarity and file format compatibility that will enable it to peacefully coexist with Microsoft Office. And its cross-platform support and ingenious use of XML (Extensible Markup Language) will pay dividends in future, more wide-scale deployments.
New features aside, the price of StarOffice--free--should be enough to give pause to sites weighing their software options in the context of Microsoft's potentially costly and entangling new licensing schemes.
We recommend IT administrators download the Star Office 6 beta and evaluate for themselves how well the suite works with the spreadsheet, word processing and presentation files in use in their organisations. (StarOffice can be downloaded) StarOffice 6.0 will run on Windows 9x, Millennium Edition, NT, 2000 and XP. StarOffice also supports Linux kernel Version 2.2.13 or higher and Solaris 7 or later, and herein lies a major competitive advantage, particu larly for sites supporting Sun or Linux workstations for CAD or software development tasks.
However, StarOffice continues to lack support for Mac OS, which is likely the most frequently found non-Windows operating system on corporate desktops and a platform that Office does serve.
XML opens new doors
The most promising part of StarOffice is its new XML-based file format. The format, which is openly documented and freely available under the GNU General Public License, 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 contained within a single compressed file. In addition to insulating companies from future changes to proprietary Microsoft file formats, a set of open file formats will enable software developers to work with productivity files in ways not possible now.
StarOffice's Writer, Calc and Impress applications represent, respectively, the suite's word processing, spreadsheet and presentation offerings. In compatibility tests, StarOffice faithfully rendered the formatting, styles and calculations from the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and templates that we use at ZDNet Reviews.
However, our tool bar macros failed to come across, and Writer replaced Word's Smart Quotes and ellipses with the letter "z." We hope that by its final version, due in the first half of next year, StarOffice will have solved the Smart Quote problem, 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 3MB file containing the text of "War and Peace" choked Word 2002 but quickly opened and was ready to edit in Writer.
Perhaps the most roundly maligned element of previous StarOffice iterations was the integrated desktop, which was crudely designed and imposed significant performance overhead. Star Office 6 behaves much better, with applications that appear and operate individually.
