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By Peter Galli  |  Posted 2005-02-14 Email Print this article Print
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


On the thorny issue of compatibility with Microsoft Office and the products in that suite, Hinstorff said StarOffice 8 took "another big step forward." The product development team spent a lot of time addressing more basic user issues, like providing the ability to take a document, read it, write it and have everything preserved. To read eWEEK Labs review of StarOffice 7, click here.

"Across the board our message is going to be interoperability, a compatible, easy-to-use user experience and a bigger set of devices supported. We will also focus our discussions at LinuxWorld on our contributions to open source. All of this is based on open source and things that we have contributed in addition to community products," he said.
Sun will also be focusing on the positioning of the products in the market. "For those mainstream core features used by the majority of users, the interoperability with other legacy software is very strong," Hinstorff said. "We want the public beta to expose any of the corner cases that we may have missed. The feedback we have got so far shows that compatibility is very good," he said. Punjabi said Openoffice.org will also benefit from the majority of the changes in StarOffice. "But the commercial quality spell checker and some other features are not included in Openoffice.org," he said. Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.


 
 
 
 
Peter Galli has been a financial/technology reporter for 12 years at leading publications in South Africa, the UK and the US. He has been Investment Editor of South Africa's Business Day Newspaper, the sister publication of the Financial Times of London.

He was also Group Financial Communications Manager for First National Bank, the second largest banking group in South Africa before moving on to become Executive News Editor of Business Report, the largest daily financial newspaper in South Africa, owned by the global Independent Newspapers group.

He was responsible for a national reporting team of 20 based in four bureaus. He also edited and contributed to its weekly technology page, and launched a financial and technology radio service supplying daily news bulletins to the national broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which were then distributed to some 50 radio stations across the country.

He was then transferred to San Francisco as Business Report's U.S. Correspondent to cover Silicon Valley, trade and finance between the US, Europe and emerging markets like South Africa. After serving that role for more than two years, he joined eWeek as a Senior Editor, covering software platforms in August 2000.

He has comprehensively covered Microsoft and its Windows and .Net platforms, as well as the many legal challenges it has faced. He has also focused on Sun Microsystems and its Solaris operating environment, Java and Unix offerings. He covers developments in the open source community, particularly around the Linux kernel and the effects it will have on the enterprise.

He has written extensively about new products for the Linux and Unix platforms, the development of open standards and critically looked at the potential Linux has to offer an alternative operating system and platform to Windows, .Net and Unix-based solutions like Solaris.

His interviews with senior industry executives include Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Linus Torvalds, the original developer of the Linux operating system, Sun CEO Scot McNealy, and Bill Zeitler, a senior vice president at IBM.

For numerous examples of his writing you can search under his name at the eWEEK Website at www.eweek.com.

 
 
 
 
 
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