StarOffice 6.0

Lawrence Teo writes "News.com, Infoworld.com, and eWeek are all reporting that Sun's StarOffice 6.0, which will be released on May 21, will cost a measly $75.95. That's less than a quarter the cost of Microsoft Office. Details are also available at Sun's own StarOffice 6.0 website." Sun's press release mentions the new features, although if you're familiar with openoffice.org, you've got a pretty good idea of what StarOffice has to offer. An anonymous reader also points out that Sun has effectively one-upped Microsoft's various schemes to get its software into schools by making an unlimited donation of StarOffice to China's Ministry of Education.

Comments

$75.95

[Anonymous Coward]

A measly $75.95? Phew, surely there can't be a comparable office suite that's any cheaper than that!

Re:$75.95

[dougga]

I believe due to some testing fluke, I was able to purchase and download StarOffice 6.0 last week. The Price was $75 I don't recall the extra $0.95 but what's the difference.

I wasn't paying much attention to the updates so I was a bit surprised that all of the integrated mail and scheduling tools were gone.

The products that remain seem to be excellent with improvments in graphics and ease of use. I haven't used them enough to really be an expert, but they seem to be clean.

I'm highly dissapointed with the lack of scheduling and email. The integration with the Palm OS was a huge advantage for me and I was planning to push this suite to clients in large part on the merits of the clean Palm integration. Nevertheless, it seems to be a win.

Now, I need to find someone who will write a clean integration tool for the Palm on Linux functionality. KPilot is a mess and J-Pilot doesn't intigrate with any other desktop apps. Sigh....

RedStarOffice

[rjamestaylor]

An apt name change, considering the overwhelming majority of potential users under this plan.

pre-order here

[Jonny Ringo]

You can already pre-order it here

Re:pre-order here

[Cardhore]

Yes! And you can even use the "buy now and we'll never ever send it to you" technology!

"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-based

[SteelX]

Wow. Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also planning their so called next-gen Office which is also supposedly based on XML. That zdnet article is pretty interesting.. it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm getting .NET-phobia) and StarOffice.

hmm

[nomadic]

Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it.

Everyone does know that the only reason Sun bought StarOffice was to have something to annoy Microsoft with, right?

Re:hmm

[Innominate Recreant]

That was a consideration. Sun's decision to charge is based on research that showed enterprise users were not adopting StarOffice 5.2, the previous version of the product, in a significant way because they questioned Sun's commitment to a product it was giving away for free and which did not come with support and training.

Re:hmm

[Guppy06]

"Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it."

I wouldn't be surprised if it does. When it comes to buying applications, most purchasers believe in the addage "You get what you pay for." While StarOffice may not be above and beyond what OpenOffice can do, the price tag demonstrates to most buyers that it's a "real" program and also suggests that there is guaranteed support behind it as well.

After all, look how well RedHat is doing compared to competitors. Or how much Mandrake is taking off as they establish a similar model.

One problem

[Disevidence]

The only real problem i can see is this is going to be hard to get to the average masses. I know quite a few people who think that they need MS Office, mainly because they have an ME or XP.

If in they're advertising, say it works the same as MS Office, and supports all their documents etc etc, then they might see a little change. The problem is, MS has had such a monopoly, its hard to breakthrough to a non-technical users level.

Missing PIM Functionality

[Trinition]

I still say they're missing PIM functionality. Figure out a way to get Evolution to work with it seamlessly. I run Windows and would glady switch away from Office if I could read/write Word documents, Excel spreadsheets -- and duplicate my Outlook PIM/e-mail functionality (and still synchronize it to my PDA).

Why China?

[driehuis]

Hmmm... Free StarOffice for Chinese kids...

One can only hope that the rollout will be done in a more responsible way that the Korean K12 Internet Access initiative. If you're the unlucky recipient of spam, chances are that a lot of it is sent to you courtesy of the Korean school system. All 16,000 schools got a preconfigured PC with some Windows toolkit on it that will connect anyone on the Internet to anyone else for any purpose. Kewl. Of course, none of the educators were educated into being good Internet citizens, and with English skills at a minimum the non-Korean speaking world now has a problem.

The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.

Re:Why China?

[ender81b]

The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move

Or why not make it available for free to all US Schools? I imagine because having the entire K-12 system in china run on star office is considered more of a 'coup' than just having it available for free to various US groups (which it really is, in the form of Open Office). It is just great propaganda to use.

Customer: So.. umm who uses this?

SUN: Well nobody really. Except 12 million chinese schoolkids, who will eventually grow up and live in what is become the world's largest economy.

Customer: Righto. Sign me up.

You instantly gain a few million users and spite microsoft in one fell swoop. I imagine MS is now plotting to get back at Star Office someway - most likely by changing MSoffice formats to make them harder to read.

Re:Why China?

[mgv]

Except 12 million chinese schoolkids, who will eventually grow up and live in what is become the word's largest economy

I think that 12 million is a bit of an underestimate. Try 100 million and you would be a bit closer to the mark. If it were only 12 million children, it wouldn't become the world's largest economy. Of course, India could still take that badge.

Michael

Re:Why China?

[Glytch]

Who's "us"? China sure isn't hostile to my country.

Discounts for multi-seat purchases?

[bc90021]

Does anyone know if there will be discounts for multiple purchases? Ie, if a company has 1,000 users that they want to switch to Star Office 6.0, will Sun give them a discount, say to $50 per seat? (Granted $76 is cheap, but corporations are always looking to save that extra buck.)

I see that there is a Star Office Now program (here), but that looks to be for vendors.

If Sun makes it so that large companies can get an even further discount, it would seem to me that they'd get even *more* people switching, which could only be a Good Thing (tm). ;)

Re:Discounts for multi-seat purchases?

[lindsayt]

If you've never bought sun software at the enterprise level, you wouldn't know...

Sun has a discount level associated with every product. The level is identified with a letter: A, D, and H for most hardware, B and P for most software, some other codes.

They negotiate discount levels with just about anybody - the bigger the institution, the steeper the discount. For example, a certain institution that I know of (I don't know if this is technically NDA so I won't mention names) has a 38% category A discount (with which we buy Sun Fire 3800s and up), a 20% category H discount (for netras and the like), and a 38% category B discount (for software like staroffice). So when we buy Solaris media with documentation, instead of $100 we pay $62.

Of course we have a site license for Solaris and StarOffice, so in reality we don't pay per seat. But when my boss got confused, we paid $62 for staroffice...

This is a standard discount with which we buy online. I know that another institution had a category A of only about 30% and a category H of about 15%... each group negotiates separately.

Compatibility Issues

[saveth]

Sun's web site mentions that StarOffice 6.0 will maintain "interoperability with other desktop suites," such as Microsoft Office. Sure, they can offer this, but will Microsoft counter it by obfuscating their document formats even more? Microsoft, may not intend to do this, but because Office has the ability to put so many things (Word Art, equations, movies, strangely placed words, etc.) into documents, the parsing process becomes a nightmare.

Currently, bare Word .doc files, for example, are fairly simple to parse and import. But, when it comes to importing embedded objects like equations and Excel spreadsheets, the parsing process becomes far less trivial. I've used X-based programs, namely Abiword and StarOffice, to read from and write to Microsoft document formats, and it's not a pleasant experience. One of my more recent trials resulted in corrupted documents, in fact. Backups were made before attempting the export, of course, so this isn't meant to be a rant, but the fact remains that the number of features Microsoft Office has is proportional to the number of points at which a program that imports or exports their formats can break.

Anyway, that's my experience with the matter. I won't be leaving Microsoft Office any time soon. Your mileage may vary.

Re:Open Office

[tzanger]

A little bit of research on your part would go a long way; OO does not have a database component (i.e. like Microsoft Office's Access), nor does it have some file filters, fonts or the clipart that StarOffice has.

For me, the database component is required, but I would plunk down my $80 for SO to "help the cause" -- I use OO right now on both Linux and Windows and under Windows, it rocks. It rocks incredibly hard. Linux OO has some issues like fonts and startup time but being able to open (and save) Microsoft documents without issue is great.

I'd love to see a KDE wrapper for SO/OO; having access to all the office functionality through DCOP and have the damn thing look right would be nice. I've tried out OpenOffice, KOffice and HancomOffice. At this point I would say OO is in the lead, with KOffice gaining ground fast. Hancom was nice but just too ... odd.

Re:Why not Open Office?

[SteelX]

The one feature which I need in StarOffice which is not available in OpenOffice.org is the templates. As someone who frequently needs to do quick presentations, templates are a must. Now if there's some project out there that produces templates specifically for OpenOffice.org, that'll really be sweet. Any takers? :-) Perhaps there's a need for a new SourceForge project.

BTW if you're interested, the diffs between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are available here. That may contain other reasons why people would prefer StarOffice instead of OOo.

XML-based.

[Anonymous Coward]

XML is just a method of storing structured data as a rooted tree. Nothing more. Nothing less.

It's become popular not becuase the technology itself is particularly revolutionary-- the technology is simple. It's become popular, rather, becuase of a number of very versatile, useful, well-done parser libraries that (for example) let you save and retrieve your structured data to and from XML without much fuss or work at all. As opposed to mucking about with file pointers and binary data and such yourself, and probably misusing a free() call somewhere and segfaulting. (There is also the associated neat ease-of-parsing technologies, like schema and XSL, but i won't get into that.) One such parser library was written by microsoft, and is part of ".NET". This is why microsoft is pushing XML right now; it's a development best practice. Or something of the sort. Not because they are moving toward XML as an "open standard".

(The fact it has a sexy acronym, and the fact that nebulous connections exist in people's minds between anything XML (no matter how useless) and the very useful technologies like SOAP and XSL that have sprung from XML, doesn't hurt.)

XML does not support interoperability in any way unless everyone agrees on common XML grammars for a specific task.

Unless Microsoft releases the XML schema for their new-office XML format, then the new MSWord format will be every bit as much unusable gibberish as the old MSWord format (except the new gibberish will contain a lot of > and < symbols, and begin with a standard tag identifying it as an XML document). Microsoft seems every bit as xenophobic as they'd ever been, and have given no indication they will release such a schema for any reason unless they are forced to as part of a court judgement terminating the current antitrust case with the states. And probably not even then, unless the court order is carried out by armed national guard members storming the Redmond compound.

Re:XML-based.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you make a really excellent point.

However, while XML documents are easier to reverse-engineer for the reason you give, it can still be plenty difficult or maybe even impossible to decipher.

If you were using HTML, which doens't take much to become valid XML, you can use any of the following to achieve the same purpose (my apologies if i haven't remembered the exact css attributes off the top of my head):

• <img align=right width=100 height=100 alt="local image" src="localimg.gif" />

or

• <table align=right><img width=100 height=100 alt="local image" src="localimg.gif" /></table>

or

• <img style="align:right; width:100; height:100" alt="local image" src="localimg.gif" />

or

• <style>img {align:right; width:100; height:100}</style> <img alt="local image" src="localimg.gif" />

And there is absolutely no reason, that if you were designing your own XML formatting system, that you couldn't make this valid:

• <align direction=right><img-entity><width value=100><height value=100><alt text="local image" /><img>localimg.gif</img>&lt ; / eight></width></img-entity></ali gn>

Look at all these different ways to do a single thing! And yes, we have a pretty clear distinction of what's a tag and what's data. But look at all those different ways of *conveying* data. Formatting (content) can be conveyed as parameters, as entities, as data within tags, as tags within tags, as header information elsewhere in the document, as parameters that serve as enumerated options just by showing up in a tag. If all those options above were gibberish acronyms instead of being in english, and if the "local image" and "localimg.gif" bits were being stored as huffman codes or something other than straightforward text (which *could* happen) i guarantee you'd have a really hard time determining in each example what was structural/logical division data, what was document-inherent/header data, what was style information, and what was content.

In an actual reverse-engineering environment this is much easier because you could make a bunch of MSXML documents and see what shows up frequently and what's different in every document-- thus telling you what's enumerated formatting and what's data-- and you could disassemble the Word executable itself and try to find the place where the XML-parsing program logic is. But it's still possible a couple of rare but crucial implications of certain innocuous-looking parameters or tags that your tests just didn't happen to touch on could slip through the cracks..

MS XML! Argh

[aaandre]

If you have seen XML documents created by MS applications you'd be be as scared as I am.

Differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org

[SteelX]

Seems that there are a lot of "Why StarOffice, and not OpenOffice.org?" posts out there. To make things easier, here's where you can find the differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.

Re:"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-base

[tzanger]

No way in hell that MS would make the office formats XML

Sure they would. They'd just do what they do now; embed the WMF data (perhaps as Base64) into <mstag> and <mstag/> tags.

XML doesn't mean shit, only that the data is organized in some kind of fashion. It does not guarantee that the data is open and accessible

Re:$75.95 != Free

[Random Feature]

Wow. You guys are really all missing the point here.

The reason that Gartner expects StarOffice 6.0 to take away 10% of M$ market share in the productivity suite arena is because it's a paid product offered by a reputable, known viable vendor.

There are a whole lot of people looking to get out from under Microsoft's licensing/upgrading set to take effect this summer. Sun's offering may entice them to jump off the fence.

While open source is ready for the enterprise, the enterprise is not necessarily reader for open source.

What does that mean? It means that most enterprise class shops won't go for something that a) isn't supported by someone on the other end of phone and b) they aren't certain will be available in 5 years because of vendor viability.

Sun doesn't really give a damn about all of us - they are targetting a larger market that will provide a longer-lived revenue stream.

And take a bite of out Microsoft's chunky a$$ at the same time.

I don't like OpenOffice. Font support sucks and some of the compatability with MS Office products is less than acceptable. Given that I absolutely have to be able to read/edit MS documents, that is an imperative.

Will I pay for StarOffice? Hell yeah. I'd rather give it to Sun than MS any day.

StarOffice came first - open office is the release of the code into the open source community. StarOffice isn't originally Sun's, but was offered as early as 1996. Sun picked it up (to the dismay of many, myself included ) in 1999.

You can read about the acquisition here

OpenOffice did not come first, StarOffice did. Sun released an earlier code base to the open source community and continued with its own development.

Crescent Office!

[commodoresloat]

JALALABAD -- March 26, 2002 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced a donation to the Ministry of Jihad (MOJ) of al Qaeda that will make StarOffice[tm] 6.0 (branded CrescentOffice[tm] in Islamic markets) an office suite of choice in madrassas throughout the Muslim world. Today's donation will provide unlimited access to one of the world's largest open productivity suites based on open source development. The technology will be available to be replicated and distributed to the students, teachers and administrators of the educational institutions governed by the ministry. The discussions today are a major expansion of the existing relationship between Sun and the MOJ.

"In the quest for learning and understanding, there is really no greater tool than technology," said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research, Sun Microsystems. "With this contribution of software, Sun and the Ministry of Jihad will work closely with students, educators and suicide bombers to enhance their ability to compete in a global economy, while opening the door to greater productivity and achievements throughout the Islamic world. Sun Microsystems will provide al Qaeda with the office productivity tools they need to destroy all Zionists and Crusaders. Allahu Akbar!"

Re:Crescent Office!

[swissmonkey]

I understand it's for fun but please...

Avoid mixing "islamic world" with "Al-Quaeda" and avoid mixing Jihad with war/fight.

Al-Quaeda is a minuscule minority of the islamic world and does not represent it.

Jihad is an extremely broad term which sometimes means war, and most of the time doesn't.

Almost all americans and many europeans have a problem understanding these two things, and through this ignorance make wrong judgements of the muslim world and muslims, it would be good if you could avoid strengthening that by mixing these things together.

$ == legitimacy in business

[pyrrho]

I think it odd but likely that charging for Star Office will facilitate it's spread. People do look gift horses in the mouth, but charge them 80$ and they go away thinking, "cheap! neat!"

Re:$ == legitimacy in business

[Elias Israel]

"What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives everything its value."
-- Thomas Paine

Year in and year out, the new cars that are rated the highest are the ones that cost the most money. Generally speaking, this is not because expensive cars are so much better than others, but primarily because those who pay are obliged, in their own minds, to evaluate what they received more highly, or call themseles fools for having made the bargain.

Re:Why?

[Jahf]

Star Office still has the Adabas database component and some extra file/print filters.

These items were proprietary code that Sun could not open source because they were not part of the Star Office purchase.

Open Office doesn't have these items, but most people won't need them. That along with commercial support are the only real differences. If you don't need a GUI database and you don't need commercial support, get Open Office.

Sun is not counting on Star Office to be a cash cow ($76Million isn't chump change, but it won't change the world either). The cost associated with Star Office is to help pay for support infrastructure, which in turn makes companies who feel that only supported software is worth using (a logical concept for an Enterprise level company) feel comfortable buying Star Office.

I've been using Open Office for months and, especially because of the last 2 releases, have gone ahead and removed Office 2000 and Star Office 5.2.

Talking paperclips and such...

[incunabulum]

I think this is the real issue here... Would you pay for an office suite that doesn't include cute, animated assistants? I know I wouldn't! I will pay any price to have a bored kitten jump around on my screen. This may be the reason why Star is being distributed in China and not Windows Office. Those office assistants have an unchecked free-spirited character that is not acceptable in a communist society. The things that that paerclip will say!

"Single" user license.

[Copperhead]

The best part about purchasing the single-user license is that you can install it on up to 5 workstations. This eliminates the "What do you mean I can't install Office on two computers?"

Re:"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-base

[flacco]

Yeah, it'll be XML, but the content will be encrypted. Like this:

<ms-word format="screw-you">

l;wekras'epfu]9rj]-w34rmgq]4 5u]`mwmu -345u1vu3bm405m-uq[w4rkv=wr,v3,rvir=\aaoifj[0u5 [0uigjmlvn'sdlku[0qrt94tu0349'rgja'ergj' q49u]1349tjg'oalrjg'90ut][340tpojer'porgj093 4u51]04jg'aorjg'q394u51340tuj4nmg'eut[034

</ms-word>

I don't understand the difference, either.

[Futurepower(R)]

I don't understand the difference, either.

From the Star Office web site, "A single-user license lets you load the StarOffice office suite onto as many as five individual workstations or PCs..."

Nice licensing, but it doesn't compare with Open Office's unlimited multiple-user licenses for free.

Also, from the Star Office web site, "Through the OpenOffice.org Project, Sun has made full use of feedback from highly talented open source programmers. The StarOffice 6.0 suite shares a codebase with the OpenOffice.org 1.0 office suite, future enhancement to the base source code are planned to be available, providing the best of both worlds to users."

Sun has certainly done everyone in the world community a great service by open sourcing Star Office, but it has not explained the difference between its version and Open Office.

I just hate glib marketing writing like this. Certainly the web site writer knew what we wanted to know. Why not just tell us?

Here we go again...

[fmaxwell]

Of course, where OpenOffice is licensed under the GPL, those fonts and functions *could* be developed and distributed for free by another group. Hmm.. I smell another sourceforge project here.

Sadly, you are probably right. Slashdot readers sit around bemoaning Microsoft's virtual ownership of the PC software market. But when some other company introduces a supported, professional, competing product, much of the discussion on Slashdot centers around:

1. Encouraging people to download free software instead of buying the new product.
2. Creating open source projects to replace the package being discussed.
3. Getting the package without paying for it.

Today was just another great example on Slashdot. First the announcement of Opera 6 for Linux. I lost count of the number of times that people suggested the use of Mozilla or some other free browser to avoid paying for Opera. At least one person posted registration codes. Others posted ways to disable the ads that pay the bills for the ad-supported version.

Now we have the announcement that StarOffice 6 will be sold for a mere $75. Are Slashdot readers celebrating the fact that Sun is going up against Microsoft in the office arena? Nope. The discussion centers around using, and extending, OpenOffice instead of purchasing StarOffice from Sun.

Microsoft management is probably thrilled by what they see here. A major competitor announces a compatible office suite that runs on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It's priced at a fraction of the price of Microsoft Office. And what do readers on Slashdot, a group that should be a prime audience for the new package, do? Look for ways to avoid buying it.

Re:Here we go again...

[jrp2]

. It's about having the ability to put it into a standard system image that's installed over the network to every machine in the department without any licensing hassles.

You bring up a very valid point. Is it easy to build into an image that can be deployed cookie-cutter style without an administrative headache?

My guess is they (Sun) are not going to be jerks about it, and probably not enforcing it with s/n's being entered, etc. Maintaining all the license paperwork for the BSA audits are also painful and expensive. That is what makes MS Office and Windows and many other apps so difficult, it is a royal pain to manage and deploy it all in an enterprise setting. If they take a laissez-fair attitude, take corp folks reasonable efforts to maintain legality as "good enough" and only go after companies that blatantly disregard the licensing, they will have achieved their goals and made a lot of friends. There are not likely to be too many companies in the blatant disregard category as they could just use OpenOffice if they want to be cheap.

Bottom line, it appears Sun is not in this office game to make a killing, but primarily to stick their fork in Microsoft's side and break their lock on the market a bit and trying to break even while doing it. I just can't see them making a fuss over licensing like MS does. As far as sharing with your friends, share OpenOffice, do you really need the extras? Corps do, you and your friends probably don't. I think this is going to work just fine.

Does anyone know what kind of licensing enforcement mechanisms are being put in SO? Are they "mass deployment friendly"?

Re:$75.95 != Free

[dhogaza]

No, the code base is the same. Sun released the code base but didn't fork their own development separate from Open Office.

As others have said, Open Office is missing components (db, fonts, templates), though.

XML is an uglier version of s-expressions!

[Cardhore]

I point out that XML is basically an uglier re-invention of Scheme/Lisp S-expressions. (see this link) XML isn't the cure-all end-all either as some might think.

Re:XML is an uglier version of s-expressions!

[Bobzibub]

My God man??
Are CRITICIZING XML????
Are You MAD?

(wouldn't shirts that say "XML Sux" be cool?) ; )

Cheers,
-b

Just when I'm beginning to rely on 5.2, too...

[Guppy06]

Here I am, setting up an Adabas database as well as working on some StarBasic scripts to automate my eBay transactions and related e-mails, and it turns out that version 6 has no browser, e-mail client or true database application (the three things I need to make the scripts do what they're supposed to do). Heck, I'm having a hard time finding out if I need to look into translating the StarBasic into JavaScript for 6.0.

I'm about ready to spend the $35 for the boxed product just to make sure I have access to the software when Sun stops supporting it. Then and only then can I even consider moving on to 6.0, and I will probably end up having the two installations sitting side-by-side.

The features that died with StarOffice 5.2 were fairly useless for the personal user (their own browser and e-mail) as well as large enterprise networks (their own database structures), but damn it if they weren't useful for us middle-of-the-road types. Unless I grab one of the last copies of 5.2, I might as well invest in a copy of Office 2000 for Access 2000, Outlook and the VBA to use between them. That or learn how to script/program for real...

Not quite,

[Bake]

It'll be like this:

<ms-word format="fu">
useineeW erA sreenignE eciffOratS
</ms-word>

Re:I don't find that on the web site.

[comcn]

From the General FAQ:

Q. What are the differences between StarOffice 6.0 software and the OpenOffice.org 1.0?

A. StarOffice 6.0 softwre is a commercial product aimed at organizations and consumers while OpenOffice.org 1.0 is aimed at users of free software, independent developers and the open source community. StarOffice includes licensed-in, third-party technology such as:

• Spellchecker and thesaurus
• Database component (Software AG Adabas D).
• Select fonts including Windows metrically equivalent fonts and Asian language fonts
• Select filters, including WordPerfect filters and Asian word processor filters
• Integration of additional templates and extensive clipart gallery

In addition to product differences, StarOffice offers:

• Updates/upgrades on CD
• Sun installation and user documentation
• 24x7 Web based support for enterprises and consumers
• Help desk support
• Warranties and indemnification guarantee Training
• Professional services for migration and deployment

...so you get the standard OpenOffice + a few extra goodies + the standard free software money-maker, support.

As for me, I've installed OpenOffice 1.0 (I'm a TeX sort of chap), buy I can see this being great for businesses.

Fix for OOo 1.0 font problem in Linux

[Nomad128]

I've read a couple post'ers comment on font issues in Linux. Here's how to solve the one I had, sacrificing a bit of startup time; I assume this will fix similar behavior in other Linux installs of OOo 1.0:

-----
Find user/psprint/pspfontcache from whatever directory your soffice binary is in

either delete this file or rename it

make a new, empty "pspfontcache" file and make it READ-ONLY ("touch pspfontcache && chmod 444 pspfontcache")
-----

The issue has something to do w/ font caching; I got this fix from OOo's IssueZilla.

There, OOo is now that much more useful for Linux users. :-)

For the record, I'd look into SO 6.0 if it had a *usable* database component (I hate to admit it, but, like M$ Access).

Re:OpenOffice didn't cut it for us -Would StarOffi

[bloo9298]

Yes, StarOffice 6.0 includes a filter for WordPerfect 8 documents according to the technical FAQ. According to the general FAQ (and somewhere else that I can't find right now), the WordPerfect filter is licensed from another company, so it won't appear in OpenOffice. I won't be holding my breath waiting for a WordPerfect filter in OpenOffice, because I gather that it is quite difficult to convert WordPerfect files to other formats.

Support, Support, Support

[lindsayt]

Three buzzwords for the business world and software:
1) Support
2) Support
3) Support

If you buy staroffice, you have support. If you download openoffice for your business, you have to contract in support, which is probably as much per seat as staroffice.

If no money exchanges hands, especially when it comes to the almighty GPL, there is absolutely NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER that the software works. Sun stakes its very life and reputation on the fact that StarOffice will work perfectly. True, the open source community produces good code, but there's no GUARANTEE of good code. Sun spent 8 months in semi-public beta of this baby (I've been using it since September).

Sun found that more companies would use StarOffice if they charged a bit for it than if it were free, for precisely this reason. Remember, the market for office suites is corporate, not personal, especially for Sun.

Re:"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-base

[Melantha_Bacchae]

SteelX wrote:

> Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also
> planning their so called next-gen Office

Actually, that was Microsoft being caught with nothing to offer when a new competitor had a new version. They can't let a competitor be in the news without blabing about themselves, so they mumbled some things about their next Office version (due in another six months to a year at the earliest). Of course they are still trying to get people to upgrade to Office XP, when many are still running Office 97, and I've even heard of one person who was still on Office 95.

> it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm
> getting .NET-phobia)

Here's a nice story that might make you feel better. Once upon a time, Microsoft spent much time and money researching a brilliant new idea. They brought it to market, and named it Bob. Poor Bob fell flat on his face and immediately died (I believe the cause was terminal stupidity, but I could be wrong). (Un)fortunately, the cute cudly assistants from Bobland were rescued and went to live in Office, where they lived happily ever after (until Microsoft recently made them disabled by default).

History, thankfully, repeats itself (because Microsoft never seems to learn). In the late 90's, Microsoft spent much more time and money researching the Millenium Project (yep, Millenium also starred as the alien that Godzilla nuked in "Godzilla 2000 Millenium"). Millenium used Java (and a JVM named "Borg") instead of C#, but it was basically the same thing that Microsoft is bringing to market under the name of ".Net". Hailstorm was to be .Net's crown jewel (and the bane of privacy organizations everywhere). Hailstorm (supprise, supprise) has fallen flat on its face, and now Microsoft announces that it too will be joining Office. Also joining Office will be the subscription fees to pay for Hailstorm (and while you are at it, Microsoft hopes you will pay for Office over and over again too).

Sooner or later, every product of Microsoft's that people hate will be bundled with either their OS or their office suite. With any luck, both Windows and Office will become so universally hated that people will switch to all the better alternatives that are out there (and more will come the more people want them).

What happens when you embrace and extend Godzilla? Nuclear heartburn!
See "Godzilla 2000" (released in Japan as "Godzilla 2000 Millenium") for details.

assistance

[commodoresloat]

The commercial version includes a talking paper clip.

Re:For the lazy ones, here's the FUD briefing

[fferreres]

FUD Part 1:
"Companies considering a switch to StarOffice or a competing product won't find the move cheap. Gartner estimates that the average cost per user would be about $1,200, which works out to about $800 for labor and $400 for productivity. In contrast, companies upgrading to Office every two years would spend about $550 per user, or $700 every four years. That means many businesses would take eight years to recover their initial investment.
" (note: Was Gartner the company that made some pro MS statements in a report, and forgot to clean the MS-signed footnotes? Can't recall but i think it was them)

FUD Part 2:
"Whenever you put StarOffice on the desktop, you're taking a risk," Smith said. "You're moving to something that's not tried and supported...There's no guarantee that file compatibility won't be a problem."


Are we happy now? :)