Excellence Awards 6 Winners, Finalists Show Innovation Up and Down IT Stack

WINNER

StarOffice 8

In the category of Productivity Applications, the eWeek Excellence Awards judges were looking for products that do more than just copy Microsofts Office suite. Suns StarOffice 8 does just that, offering unique features and a multiplatform system that meets the OASIS ODF standard.

In terms of features, extensibility and compatibility, StarOffice really stands out. The judges particularly liked that the office suite supports the Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems—not to mention that it costs significantly less than Microsoft Office.

In fact, eWeek Labs Senior Analyst Jason Brooks said in his October 2005 review of StarOffice 8 that the Sun suite is Microsoft Offices toughest rival yet and stands up better than ever to Microsofts offering.

StarOffice 8s word processing (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation (Impress) and database (Base) functions are very capable, and the Sun suite has shown good compatibility with Microsofts offering—an important consideration in a world where Microsoft still has the lions share of the market.

StarOffices support for ODF (OpenDocument Format) is especially compelling since Microsoft has not announced it will support the standard in its forthcoming Office 2007 suite. ODF will allow for diversity among office suite applications without requiring format importers and exporters and the compatibility issues that often accompany them.

FINALISTS

SupportDesk 8.2

NetworkStreamings solution offers an easy way for IT managers to provide help desk support. The SupportDesk 8.2 appliance gives support professionals remote control capabilities for taking care of troubled PCs. In this category, the Excellence Awards judges especially liked the fact that, once an IT manager logs out of a session, SupportDesk is completely uninstalled and leaves no footprint.

ThinkFree

ThinkFree Office Server Edition

The server-based office productivity suite from ThinkFree provides Microsoft Office-like capabilities over the network to end users PCs. Judges gave high marks to ThinkFree Office Server Edition for its potential to lower management costs. And, like the winner in this category, Suns StarOffice 8, ThinkFree can be deployed on a variety of major operating systems, including Linux, Windows and Suns Solaris.

—Anne Chen

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