Open Office

[Sean]

This seems to be a nice write up. on staroffice.

http://eletters1.ziffdavis.com/cgi-bin10/flo?y=eLVH0BgDvg0DSm0OLV0AK
Staroffice Offers IT Real Choice

Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice may not be ready to totally displace
Microsoft Office in the enterprise, but eWEEK Labs' tests of the
StarOffice 6 beta show that the suite has the stuff to at least loosen
Microsoft Corp.'s iron grip on the office productivity market.

Sun's StarOffice has the interface familiarity and file format
compatibility that will enable it to peacefully coexist with Microsoft's
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 that IT administrators download the StarOffice 6 beta and
evaluate for themselves how well the suite works with the spreadsheet,
word processing and presentation files in use in their organizations.
(StarOffice can be downloaded from
www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/6.0beta/get.html.)

StarOffice 6.0 will run on Microsoft Windows 9x, Millennium Edition, NT,
2000 and XP. StarOffice also supports Linux kernel Version 2.2.13 or
higher and Solaris 7 or better, and herein lies a major competitive
advantage, particularly for sites supporting Sun or Linux workstations for
computer-aided design or software development tasks.

However, StarOffice continues to lack support for the Macintosh, which is
likely the most frequently found non-Windows operating system on corporate
desktops, and a platform that Microsoft Office does serve. Although Sun
has confirmed that it will not release a Macintosh version of the suite, a
Macintosh port of OpenOffice‹the Sun-sponsored, open-source version of
StarOffice‹is in the works.

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
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. StarOffice uses the popular ZIP compression form, so with
a standard ZIP program and a text editor, users can see exactly what their
documents contain. In addition to insulating firms 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 now
possible.

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 eWEEK.

However, our toolbar 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 toolbar 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. StarOffice 6 behaves itself much
better, with applications that appear and operate individually.

This new design modesty also extends to the way that the Sun suite handles
file saving. As with other word processors, StarOffice's Writer by default
saves documents in its own file format (.SXW). However, Writer includes
the option for users to save documents in Microsoft Word format by
default, thereby reducing confusion for users in mixed Word/Writer
environments. In our tests, this setting didn't work, but we expect it to
be ironed out in the final release.