Suns StarOffice 7 Shines

Sun Microsystems Inc.s StarOffice 7 productivity suite is a capable cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Corp.s Office that comes at a price too attractive for enterprises to ignore.

The follow-on to last years impressive StarOffice 6 starts at less than one-sixth the cost of Microsoft Office 2003, yet in eWEEK Labs tests, the StarOffice suites word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications performed well and exhibited strong support for Microsofts binary DOC, XLS and PPT file formats. This means it will likely coexist well with Office 2003.

StarOffice 7, which began shipping last month, isnt for organizations that have already built heavily upon Microsofts VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) framework for office automation. These sorts of customizations wont carry across to Suns suite.

In addition, its likely that power users of Office will find that StarOffice lacks—or implements differently—certain features to which theyve become accustomed. For us, it was the "paste options" smart tag that began in Word 2002.

However, StarOffice should handle most corporate users office suite needs with ease, and we found its interface similar enough to Microsoft Office to minimize training issues for most users. We recommend that interested IT staffs evaluate StarOffice to figure out how well the suite handles their organizations needs.

StarOffice 7 is priced at $79 retail. Sun also sells 25-user packs for $1,500, and for larger-volume purchases, prices range from $50 per user for 150 users to $25 per user for 10,000 users. StarOffice licenses allow users to install as many as five copies of StarOffice software on the systems they operate. For educational customers, license fees dont apply; Sun charges only for shipping and media costs.

By comparison, Corel Corp.s WordPerfect Office 11 (see review), which we reviewed in May, costs $299. Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition retails for $499; the Academic Edition costs $149.

For a free alternative, companies can check out OpenOffice.org 1.1, the open-source project on which StarOffice is based. At the time of this writing, OpenOffice.org was at the Release Candidate 5 stage, which is available for download at www.openoffice.org.

Unlike OpenOffice.org users, StarOffice users can turn to Sun for Web-based and help desk support, CD updates, training, and professional migration and deployment services.

Whats more, StarOffice includes additional (albeit not free) components that OpenOffice.org does not, such as a spelling checker, a thesaurus and Software AGs Adabas D database application. OpenOffice ships with its own, separate spell checker and thesaurus. StarOffice also ships with fonts and filters (such as those for WordPerfect) that OpenOffice.org does not.

In addition, the K Desktop Environment and GNOME projects each has its own office suite. In previous tests, we preferred StarOffice/OpenOffice to those suites. However, KOffice is nearing its 1.3 release, and Version 1.0 of GNOME Office recently shipped; expect evaluations of those suites in a future eWEEK Labs review.