An Early Look at StarOffice 8

polar_bear` writes "NewsForge has an early review of Sun's StarOffice 8, set to be released in mid-October. From the article: 'StarOffice 8 is not perfect, but it is an excellent value for businesses that do not depend on proprietary Microsoft formats for production work.'" And yes, for the uninitiated, NewsForge is still owned by the same parent company as Slashdot.

Comments

Obvious

[Orrin Bloquy]

FInally, a ReaSon To consider Picking Out another office SuiTe.

Re:Obvious

[Comboman]

CLEarly VERy few microsofT oWners wIll swiTch.

No compelling features over OOo 2.0?

[octaene]

So, after reading the article, I didn't see any compelling features beyond what OpenOffice.org 2.0 promises. I saw several references to StarOffice's superiority over Microsoft Office 2003, but that's about it.

Me, I'll wait for OpenOffice.org 2.0. BTW, when is that, anyway?

Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0?

[AKAImBatman]

The differences basically amount to:

1. StarOffice has better MS Office support (I assume thanks to the Sun/MS Deal)
2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo
3. Sun provides corporate support for StarOffice. You're on your own for OOo.
4. Extra bundled stuff like fonts, clipart, and templates. Nice if you do a lot of office documents, but not critical or irreplacible.

Me, I'll wait for OpenOffice.org 2.0. BTW, when is that, anyway?

When it's done. They've released betas of it as OOo 1.9.x, so you can go grab a copy whenever you feel like it.

OpenOffice

[kevin_conaway]

From the article, StarOffice is based on the OpenOffice.org source code, and is very much like OpenOffice.org 2.0, with a few enhancements

I thought OpenOffice was originally based on StarOffice?

Re:OpenOffice

[einhverfr]

I thought OpenOffice was originally based on StarOffice?

It was. Just like Mozilla and Netscape. Serpent eating tail....

Another way to look at it is that OOo was released as an open source version of the pre-StarOffice 6.0 codebase. OOo forms the basic foundation on which StarOffice 6.0 and later is built on.

What is based on what?

[GenKreton]

"StarOffice is based on the OpenOffice.org source code, and is very much like OpenOffice.org 2.0, with a few enhancements:"

Not to be overly-pedantic, but isn't OOo based On StarOffice...?

Re:What is based on what?

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://about.openoffice.org/index.html

StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.

Hexus link?

[kosanovich]

I heard Hexus has a review up of the new staroffice too...

(Slightly O/T) OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I like OpenOffice on platforms for which it was designed to work (Win32, Linux), but it uses so many non-portable Linuxisms that it runs extremely poorly to not at all on OpenBSD, even with Linux emulation and Linux-style /proc enabled. That is to say that it runs, but consumes far too much memory and crashes frequently. And I'm too lazy to try patches from NetBSD pkgsrc or FreeBSD ports, so right now I've been using AbiWord and gnumeric in place of OO. They are fine, but don't do Office formats as well, and AbiWord generates really lousy postscript, which means that anything I print comes out looking like shit.

(Please don't make this into a question of Linux vs BSD or free vs propriertary OS, that's not the point I'm trying to make.)

From a usability perspective I like OpenOffice, but I wish it were more portable. In my mind, if a program uses too many Linuxisms that don't hold on other Unix-like systems and require non-trivial patches to port, it is a good sign that the code is poorly written. I.E. it's doing stupid things like relying on Linux-specific values in /proc, or not checking return values of functions that can fail, or making generally unsafe assumptions that just don't happen to come up on Linux. That's a sign of bad code. In defense of OO, it is fine to work with where it does work, and in some cases I like the UI better than MS Office. The best I can say is that it's come a long way since StarOffice 5, which ran poorly, even on systems on which it was designed to run.

Learning StarOffice is Hard

[fragmentate]

We tried the "open source initiative" here.

StarOffice, although complete, is too different from MS Office. It's not that people can't use StarOffice as efficiently as they can use MS Office...they simply do not want to. It was difficult to get anyone to take it seriously. Even though every single feature of MS-Office that they actually use is in there, they were hell-bent on refusing to use it because of the features StarOffice lacks that they never use.

Talk about stifling oneself.

Re:Learning StarOffice is Hard

[swordgeek]

What you're saying is really a universal truth: Something new and unknown is harder to use than something old and familiar. Or more succinctly, people are lazy. If you give people the option, they will virtually NEVER switch to something new, even if it has significant (but not compelling to them) advantages. That's why MS won the browser wars by bundling IE into the OS, even though it's been a piece of shite most of its life. Ditto for MS Media Player and Outbreak--both utter excrement.