[ILUG] Star Office

[philb at vodafone.ie]

Hi 

Firstly, StarOffice is Suns product offering based around the OpenOffice.org project. 
It is a superset of OOo with the extra elements being some help files and 
minor additions that could not be open sourced with the rest of OOo due 
to licensing issues. Thus, you can take any comments regarding stability, 
interoperability and general ease of use to apply to both equally. 

The main points I would make about it are:

1. It's slow to start up but runs fine once it's up (on Windows the quick launch 
helps this)
2. It doesn't generally crash, probably about as stable as Office 2k. 
3. The interoperability is achieved in the face of passive aggression (at 
best) from Microsoft. It will never be perfect but it's good. I've heard 
of OOo opening documents which Office 2000 chokes on. However, it's not 
a good idea to save your document in Word or Powerpoint format and expect 
that Office2K users will get the same formatting that you see. 
4. For some reason, the excel support is vastly better (simpler, better 
documented?) so you can do the above with spreadsheets
5. You can create PDFs directly from OOo documents. This is a single step 
procedure and works really well. This is how I send out invoices, letters 
etc. To get the same functionality on Office 2K, you need to buy acrobat 
distiller which I think costs about €600 per seat. This is a big win.
6. Office power users won't like it. This is something you will just have 
to live with. These people have built up all of the arcane knowledge about 
word, excel and powerpoint required to really make office fly. This will 
translate conceptually over to OOo but not directly. They'll just have to 
relearn that stuff.
7. Documentation: there are hundreds of books on MS Office out there and 
only a handfull on StarOffice/OpenOffice. Check the openoffice.org site 
for a list of books. 

In my opinion, your main problems will not relate to technical limitations of 
the software but user acceptance. For non power users, the transition should 
be something akin to a transition from Office 2000 to Office 2003 but this 
kind of change is easier since people buy into it more readily. 

You can potentially sell it on security and the fact that people can legally take 
away a copy themselves and install it at home. Also, 2.0 will be using the 
Open Doc format  which unlike MS Office, is an open standard. State funded 
institutions have a mandate to prefer open standards where this is feasible 
and OpenOffice/StarOffice definitely win here. 

-phil




> I was just wondering if anyone had any opinions on Star Office?  How is 
> interoperability with MS Office, and how does functionality compare to 
> MS Office?
> 
> Also if anyone is using Star Office or knows of any companies or 
> organisations using Star Office, I'd be interested to talk to them.
> 
> PJ
> -- 
> Irish Linux Users' Group
> http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/


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