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StarOffice Significantly Delayed
Emil S Hansen writes "ZDNet has a story about StarOffice being delayed until late 2000. The reason should be that they need some more coding done. 'Remaining efforts necessary to complete the Star Product offering relate primarily to additional coding, testing, and implementation.' But they should go into beta around spring/sommer 2000. " The original release was apparently scheduled for the end of this year, so this is fairly significant delay. However, as the article notes as well, the main competition for them, Office 2000 will not be out until roughly the same time. I should have been more clear - this is in reference to the Internet versions of both Star and Microsoft Office.
Update: 11/12 04:47 by Nik. ZDNet have corrected this story. StarOffice is not delayed until late 2000, but until the second half of Sun's fiscal year 2000, which, confusingly, is the first half of the actual year 2000, which Sun had already announced as planned.
Hopefully this will become a Microsoft-killer. But the big question is, will StarOffice 2000 still be free?
Companies buy the server software, implement a corporate wide productivity suite over their intranet. Sysadmin job becomes easier. Saves money.
Think intranet, not internet.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
So I guess this means that not many people are contributing code under Sun's crappy SCSL. Not surprising at all.
When is Sun going to wake up! There are thousands of coders ready to help them for nothing if they would just GPL the damn thing!
StarOffice is not going to challenge Office until it is truly open. Sun is fooling themselves if they think otherwise.
Aaron
Yes, the posters here on /. are very mixed up.
Both Office 2000 and StarOffice are out.Both the desktop versions of Office 2000 and StarOffice are available today. But the web-based versions are still in development.
It is the web-based versions that the article was reporting on. I would be grateful if everyone kept that in mind as they posted responses.
-Brent--
Well, which Productivity Suite has the largest marketshare today? If you were going to develop and market a competing product, the main competitor would be the one with the largest market share.
Certainly Applix, Wordperfect Office, Koffice and others are competitors, but none of them have near enough marketshare to contend for the position as the main competitor.
-Brent--
Really ?
... it is way better then any version of netscape ever was.
You are right about MS being scared about new stuff comming out. But you are wrong about them doing nothing.
Look at IE
Yes, it will reduce your TCO dramatically because it is developed for ASP's. No longer will you have to keep installing new versions and supporting the installations, because it is run over the Web.
-Brent--
What exactly is a web- or internet-enabled version of an office suite (either Star Office or Microsoft Office)? Does it mean a Java-like approach where pieces of the application are downloaded as needed? Or is it just installation of the standard software over the internet, maybe with a Netscape-like "smart update"?
Uh, what do you think would be cheaper and easier to implement, and much easier to sell to consumers. A phone capable of running Office 2000, or a phone capable of displaying Office 2000 running on a server across the web.
What about a set top box like WebTV. Is it more logical to be able to run Office 2000 locally, or over the web? I have the feeling that most consumers don't care where it's running as long as it is there.
Especially - why would you want to pay good money for the privilege?You have to consider the market that these vendors are focusing on. Definately low-tech consumers, who just want a low-cost way to get on the web, send email, and do word processing. That don't want to deal with installing software and keeping it up to date. A $99 box with a $20 monthly fee is exactly what will interest them.
-Brent--
It's amazing that M$ manages to have these backward-compatibility issues any time a new version of Office is released. Will they never learn that most companies can't afford in either money or man-hours to upgrade hundreds or thousands of workstations at the exact same time and compatability with older versions is very important? Guess not, they've had plenty of chances to learn.
This followup article at ZDNet implies that the delays were caused by the fact that MSFT poached a few top developers from Sun's Star Division.
Of course Sun could retaliate by GPLing the code but that would mess up their plans for becoming the next MSFT.
Bad Command Or File Name
I suspect that this will play out as a trend in Open Source and quasi-open source development projects lead by the likes of Sun and Netscape(Aol). Large companies will decide to release the source to something, and fail to see the value which Open Source projects employ in the release-early-release-often model. This is unfortunate, since releasing a not-quite-there-yet, but promising version as "alpha" would get other people finishing features and fixing bugs that they needed to scratch. This is what I think Mozilla has done wrong. They release these non-functional Mx releases as code benchmarks, but fail to work on getting a nice looking, feature light version out the door so that large masses of people will USE it, and eventually have some of them join the project. They've already forgotten how fast the Australians were able to impliment real crypto back when everyone thought that Mozilla would be a usable browser in 2 months.
NOTE: I'm not involved with either effort, but if my statements are incorrect because of my lack of inside knowledge, then they are likely to -- even more accurately -- reflect what the average Linux/Open Source user is thinking....
Isn't Office 2000 already out? I swear I have seen it floating around the office lately.
This is good news for KOffice
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Uhm - yea - Office 2000 is already out...
If nobody -sees- the new Star Office, how can they buy it?
IMHO, this is a vital reason for releasing at least a beta version, so that people can try it out and report bugs. It'll speed up testing, enormously. And, if they release the source, too, people can even return the bug fixes, as well!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
now sun have the money and the time maybe they are testing it ??
or then again maybe it was such a hack that they would not be able to ship it ontime without comeing under lots of crititism
anyway delays to products are good (in a sense) it shows that people are thinking esp now SUN have got hold of it there would have been a running round in circles "we made lots of money" time when they should have been coding
time is of course relitve to what you measure it by !
regards
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
And in fairly common usage.
I have just began to play with Star Office 5.1 and I must say I like it alot. But however it seems to me that it is only able to be compared to MS Office 97. The new features offered in Office 2000 however useless do seem to be more abundant.
I do honestly beleive though if you are planning to blindly reoutfit your company with MS Office 2000 just because it is new, then you are a fool. Good IT department heads with any sense would at least review Star Office and see what potential it has to offer for their company.
STAR OFFICES PROS:
1.> Star Office is offered for free by 'Sun Microsystems'
2.> A single copy of MS Office 2000 can run you several hundered dollars.
3.> You can download one copy of Star Office and install it on as many machines as you like without fear of the fabled Software Police conducting a raid on your company.
4.> Personal Opinion: The new features in MS Office 2000 are not so great that they warrant the upgrade cost.
5.> Upgrade cost for MS Office 2000 can run into the one hundred thousand dollar range or higher for large companys with thousands of computers.
STAR OFFICE CONS:
1.> Doesn't have as many features as MS Office 2000.
2.> Would be a challenge to retrain end users to use a different product.
3.> IT departments wouldn't get to waste corporate funds that could be used for useful projects or employee bonuses.
I don't get it... what's this all about?
StarOffice works great on RedHat 6.1 which
supposedly is glibc-2.1, right?
Baffled,
Uwe
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Wanna see what an Internet office application looks like? As an Applixware user I've been watching this site closely and it shows promise!!
It's a pity that they haven't really announced it, but applix's web based office suite is up and running at applixanyware.com.
Maybe it's still in beta, but it worked for me when I had to convert a word file to html a while back. I'd use it more, but I'm stuck at 26.4.
Well... maybe I'm a old fuddy duddy, but I'm inclined that this is a case of Sun/MS trying to create a need by creating a product then filling it with all of the hype/buzzwords that get the marketing drones all lathered up in a frenzy.
:) so they just keep pushing these goofy ideas on the masses and teling us it's the "wave of the future"... yea.. I'm gonna load up my spreadsheet from this months sales analysis on my web-enabled pcs phone.. sheesh.
Firstly, what is wrong with regular client/server lan software. Same concept, install on the server, then the clients run it from there. Time to upgrade...okay.. upgrade the version on the server..away you go. Why do we feel like we have to use the web for everything these days.. seems like knowbody really knows what to do with the web (besides e-commerce and porn
Secondly... I don't care how friggin secure the web server is.. I'm not gonna hang my sensitive financial data ( or any other sensitive docs ) out there for any script-kiddie cracker to gun for. I want that stuff inhouse on a non-internet connected network. At least in the near futute.
Now excuse my while I surf the web with my pcs phone...sheesh..
Like GPL really helped netscape. Wheres 5.0 again?
Since StarPortal will be offered at the same time as the office 2000 version, sun will find itself overshadowed by Office 2000.
Realistly, Microsoft will steal the limelight, and Star Portal will be more of a side issue. Had star office been released in December, it would have been able to gain market share ahead of Microsoft. Companies who would have started to use Star Portal, may be less encouraged to use Office 2000 upon its release. It would be more established in the market and within those companies who choose to use it.
I really think this delay is going to cost Sun dearly - and gives microsoft an advantage - in terms of marketshare and time to spread its FUD of why we shouldn't be using competing products.
You have to consider the market that these vendors are focusing on. Definately low-tech consumers, who just want a low-cost way to get on the web, send email, and do word processing.
Nope. I think you're wrong here. The market for this is large businesses who have a computer or terminal on each employee's desk. I work in a company with a mixed desktop environment. Some people have OS/2 machines, some people have Win32 machines, and some people still have Unix machines. They've implemented Citrix Winframe to deliver Office 2000 to the people on the OS/2 and Unix desktops. I have a Windows box on my desk, so I have traditional Office 2000 installed on my machine's hard drive.
Maybe, there will be a market push for this sort of server-based application over the wire to people outside companies, but I suspect the profit center will be in delivering Office apps this way within corporate internets.
I have used StarOffice 5.1 for OS/2 for a while and I absolutely love it. Running on IBM's OS/2 Warp, StarOffice 5.1 is a pleasure to use. I highly recommend it. The MS Office compatibility is good enough for me. The prices is terrific.
They should open source it so it gets developed quicker and better just like mozilla.
Oh, wait.
:-)
I am wrong, but only sort of. Actually, there are a few different markets that this will do strongly in. Intranet usage will be huge, I agree.
I just was focusing on one market segment, the one that would tend to use iPhones and set-top boxes. Not to imply that there was any other, or any bigger markets.
-Brent--
Companies that don't have the wisdom (my company does) to ask people to save all shared documents in the older .DOC/.XLS format during the transition deserve to absorb the losses they'll incur for their incompetence.
Then, when we're all warm and fuzzy and feelin' fine, let's turn on the television and watch some Rainbow Brite cartoons. And Barney comes on next, after that! Wheeee!
Star Office for the Internet has not been released like someone really cares. It will be a day in hell before I start paying for each and every use (pay per use). Corel has the same plans with Word Perfect (only 9.99/mth). As far as I am concerned this is method of gouging the consumer and taking direct control away from the user. Good luck Sun, Corel, and Microshaft.
This is the problem you Linux closet cases are going to run into... loosing grasp of the rest of the market. Office 2000 has been out for months!! Wake up!
I mean, what exactly "over the web" suite is?
1. SunRay-like thing with application running on the server and low-level screen-copying to terminals?
2. X or X-like thing with application running on the server and remote drawing on window system level with multiple applications independently talking to one screen?
3. The same with high-level widgets?
4. The same in Java?
5. Application, running on client with very high-level functionality (wordprocessor screen) on the client with server-based backend assisting?
6. The same with application in Java?
7. Application, running entirely on the client with server doing centralized configuration, administration and licensing only?
8. The same in Java?
9. Application running entirely on the client with server doing nothing but actual file storage?
10. The same in Java?
Can anyone explain, what exactly is it supposed to be in both Sun and Microsoft cases? Or is it all vaporware of the purest kind -- when no one has slightest idea, what is it supposed to be?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
ZDNet and Slashdot's post didn't have any errors in it -- they were just confusing. It's not talking about the current version of StarOffice, or the current version of Office2000. It's talking about the web-enabled version of the two. And no, you don't have that yet.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
For a LAN however, Sun's whole idea is to subvert the PC paradigm. At my company, for example, we don't have hard disks on our desks. We use Sun servers and NCD X terms. Every time we need to do some word processing, we pull up a Citrix NT session in an X window and run Word.
Yes, it sucks. It really sucks. But that's how dominant MS Office is. Even at a committed Unix shop, we need to be able to generate and read Word files to interact with the rest of the world.
So, for an office without PCs (what Sun wants everywhere) running StarOffice over X is a hell of a lot better and cheaper than running an NT session + MS Office over X, which is what we're doing now.
When you look at the BIG picture, the TCO of going with X terms or the new SunRay type appliances is much less than a PC environment for a large company. Removing the WinFrame/Word part of that equation makes it look even better. StarOffice may not integrate effectively into the PC paradigm, but that's not really the point.
The point is that Sun doesn't have to compete with Microsoft on the PC desktop. They just have to make it possible to do business without a PC desktop, without any MS products. Then you can run your office on SunRays or super PalmPilots or that neato FreePad thing. It blows the whole thing wide open when you break the Word monopoly, which is really Microsoft's crown jewel.
In order for the 'big' penetration to happen. some company somewhere will have to give away that killer app and GPL it. They will lose a lot of money. They wont ever probably really benefit from it again. But the market as a whole would be greatly enhanced. Sun is in just such a position. No it may not work for everyone. By now people should stop making those 'open source' solves this problem and that comments. Those are lame.. But if a company WOULD do this it would be nice. But realize. It wont solve a lot of problems. just help us on our way.. Bah bah bah Jeremy Allen
What I want to know is what the new version is going to offer that everyone is so excited about? I haven't checked the Sun site, but I a very impressed with Star Office already. I would give anything if Sun would make an Star Office into a full Window Manager I love the look and feel. Yeah yeah I know it looks like Windows and that is bad, but I still really like it. (although I really really would like multiple desktops) I'd bet Windows users wouldn't know the difference, it would really help people switch to Linux. I would also like to have the ability to change colors, I HATE grey!!
Office 2000 uses the same formats as Office 97.
Well, imagine a company. Ethernet will be fast enough for this technology. And it'll save a lot of money on hardware, licenses and maintenance.
Will /. posters never learn to check the facts before proving beyond a doubt how clueless they are?
I also use StarOffice under OS/2, though at the moment I've only 5.0 installed. I just picked up Red Hat 6.1, and it includes a StarOffice 5.1 CD that contains all versions, including OS/2, so I'll probably upgrade to 5.1 this weekend.
I've a K6-2 350, and StarOffice was a dog when the machine had less than 64MB. At 64MB it became tolerable. I'm now at 256MB and it's quite nice with that much memory. Since my memory free gauge is around 130MB when I run StarOffice, I suspect it will run equally as well with 128MB.
I use it for the newsgroups, email, and handling MS Office documents at home. The web browser has better support than Netscape for PNG images as it supports transparent background images. I've used the presentation software to create back-of-computer pictures(with all connections nicely labeled) for the OS/2 sysems I've built for family members. I've also used the spreadsheet software for minor things, and have even written some functions in StarBasic for the spreadsheets. All-in-all its quite a nice suit, with some polishing here-and-there that needs to be done
I would agree that a number of IS shops will check out StarOffice. From my viewpoint I think the killer will be import/export of Word95/97 docs and Excel95/97 files. If it can't cope with these (and I don't mean VBA macros) than IS won't adopt it.
But under no circumstances should Sun try to out-market MSFT. You don't fight the enemy on their strong ground. Fix it, make it reliable, do a good job. That is why Linux is attractive.
Will in Seattle
Sun absolutely should not try to compete with MS on its own turf, that being marketing and fast releases, quality be damned. It'll never beat the Redmond hype machine. Sun's strength is in a high-quality product with better value. It should stick with that strategy because it's the single biggest advantage is has over MS.
Your insinuation being that Microsoft Office2000 is a shoddy piece of work, slapped together hastily as grist for the upgrade mill.
I have not found this to be the case. I use Outlook2000 and Word2000 in my regular daily work, and have few complaints. O2k is leaner, faster, and more reliable than O98 while at teh same time added features I've been lacking. Word2k has some excellent XML features that make my job a ton easier, and it still boots in a matter of eyeblinks.
When I downloaded StarOffice at home (nine hours - gak) I discovered that their metaphor appears to be "steal from the superficial appearance of MS Office but don't supply the back end support". I wasn't satisified. While I did observe crashes and bugs, their development would require heavy feature implementation rather than patches if they want to supplant the MS Office titan.
Microsoft Office may enjoy it's dominance partly due to the monopolistic operating system structure MS holds, but I think you would have a difficult chore proving that it is not the most complete, powerful, and intelligent office suite around.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Or MS Works 95 even!
Star Office hasn't caught up with Office95 yet, let alone Office2000
But even so, I see this a blind acceptance of this by the general user community as somewhat shortsighted. Let's say I have one-year license with an internet service vendor, that "serves" either StarOffice, or the stuff from Microsoft. As soon as I terminate my license, access to any documents I've created using the software is effectively terminated. I may be able to import them into another software package, but this is far from foolproof.
Privacy is another concern. Companies with the required resources can run their own servers, but what about individuals who use the software as service provided by an ISV? With software running on a local machine, at least the TCP stream can be monitored to determine exactly what's being sent, and where. If the software is running on a central server, there's no way to tell what's going on.
I can certainly understand the appeal of this technology, but I'd tend to think that it might lock people into a particular platform. Additionally, if customers *knew* that the potential exists for monitoring everything they do, would it be just as viable?
If you read the bit about "free memory" you'll see I'm not using 256 for StarOffice as I thought I had 130MB free. Now that I'm home, I see I was low on the free value. I'm currently running Netscape and StarOffice, dialed into the internet, and have 146MB free. 64MB is OK to run it, though for me it works better with more as I mostly use it while I'm online. Being online means I have Netscape and other software running besides StarOffice.
So for me, 128MB is ideal for my normal internet activities. 256MB makes my C development much nicer :-)
I just don't need another office suite. Blah. Hell, I don't really user wordprosessor much. But maybe I should get one, to gather dust in the bookshelf?
/.
Is this a mix up?
Both Office 2000 and StarOffice are out.
How was this decision arrived at? Do people believe it offers a feature set superior to Office 97 but comparable to Office 2000?
In any case, Office 2000 has been out for a couple of months now...hardly late next year...
However, as the article notes as well, the main competition for them, Office 2000 will not be out until roughly the same time.
Nope, wrong. Office 2000 is out already. The article only comments on M$'s plans for Internet distribution. Right now, you still have to truck your ass down to a store, or find another retailer online (who will probably sell it cheaper than M$ direct will).
-Jake
I've installed O2K on many computers in my office, as well as my home computer. Is there a significant improvement being made for a "new-improved" version by the end of 2K?? Curious...
(Close-up of Neo - Look of agog on his face - Said in a half-whisper)"Whoa!"
Sorry for pooping your party, but Star Office has been out for years. Im happily running 5.0 since early this year, and 5.1 has also been released since then.
Id say this slashdot outline of the article is as much rubbish as the article ("16-year-old programmer") itself.
The post wasn't very clear, but the article is about the versions of the software which will be accessed over the internet.
AbiWord looks very promising, it is lean, fast, stable, and looks nice, and looks like it is being coded very well. Its still missing many features, but that will just take time. No 80mb download, I think it was only 700K. In the future I think this product could be very competitive with some of the bigger companies. The best part, it's all open source!
I'm with you in theory on that one AC, but when you have the software monkey(s) running around installing new software on every box without thought of any consquences (or even license argeements!) it's hard to maintain order let alone compatibility or stability. If only they would let me install NT on the boxes at work... I'd perfer Linux but I'll take NT over 95/98 anyday. Yes... I am a fascist sys admin :)
-Tom
I was reading the StarOffice 5.1 whitepaper, and noticed a few vague references to the "StarOffice One API". Any info?
Star Office is implemented in a client-server model, with componentized code. Typically, Star Office runs both layers on one machine. Today, Star Office can run in a client server mode over a network. Star Office version 4 had a Java thin-client version that ran ordinary Star Office code on the server (either NT or Solaris), and a Java-based presentation layer on the thin client. Star Portal will be the second generation version of the latter, but designed so it can run over a 56 Kbps modem. The presentation layer will be a downloadable on demand Java Bean, and my guess in the interface will make use of HTML and JavaScript to keep the bandwidth requirements down. The nice thing is you keep your gigantic multi-megabyte Star Impress presentations on the server, and only manipulate them with the browser. The other nice thing is this should work seamlessly with the existing client-server version so you could use the regular Star Office at work, and then access the same data files over the web via Star Portal. Since all you have in the browser is the presentation layer, all of the file formatting issues are back on the Star Portal server, so if Sun decides to support other file formats, you just upgrade the server.
Oh wait ! You freaks are TOO F*CKING POOR to afford that. After all it's only $400. Maybe you should use Word-Imperfect instead. FUCK LINUX ESR SUX
You Spik !! You fucking piece of trash. How can a 4th rate company like Sun (Sux) get ahead of a 4 Trillion $ company ? By using you as their chief retard no doubt. Go back to Third World South America you FUCKING WETBACK SPIK .
Since all you have in the browser is the presentation layer, all of the file formatting issues are back on the Star Portal server, so if Sun decides to support other file formats, you just upgrade the server.
And how high/low-level the interactions between server and client are? documents in intermediate format? widgets and updates? every keypress/mouse/editing command? Is protocol documented? Open? Published?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
you stupid astroturfer.
(Score: -5 Astroturf)
I haven't exercised it heavily yet, but it runs.
I agree with Brad. The best thing Sun could do with it is not release anything new until they know they have a well polished, stable, efficient product. This is the way software was produced before M$ started getting the public to pay good money to test their betas. And I think it could be a positive marketing tactic in the post-Micro$oft economy. ;-)
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
I don't have a clue as to the how. My guess is it is a lot like Applix Anywhere, which is the client-server version of Applix with a Java presentation layer. It must pass the updates via HTTP in order to pass them through a firewall, if needed.
I'd love to get a copy of StarOffice that worked under libc-2.1. If anything that should be their primary emphasis, but I have a feeling it's more like Sun wanting to get their portal integrated in it. Sun's pledge was primarily aimed at integrating Sun's portal and advertising Sun products through the word processor and not at improving the word processor itself. But any delay is a good delay. It just allows us unemployed C++ coders to show off while the suits with their PhDCS credentials and certification watch their schedules melt away.
Correction for Hemos. Office 2000 is available right now. My company is rolling out office 2000 this week actually.
The will is there, due to Microsoft's pricing, for corporate IS shops to give StarOffice a try. They'll try it now, or they'll try it in six months, because MS isn't going to drop their prices any time soon.
What corporate IS shops don't have is the will to keep trying it. They'll allocate the resources to give it a test run once. If they find it to be a piece of junk, there aren't likely to be any second chances.
Sun absolutely should not try to compete with MS on its own turf, that being marketing and fast releases, quality be damned. It'll never beat the Redmond hype machine. Sun's strength is in a high-quality product with better value. It should stick with that strategy because it's the single biggest advantage is has over MS.
Has the AOL/Sun/Netscape deal screwed up a lot of things? Mozilla has been a fiasco for a year until they basically started over. Things look better now, but nevertheless Mozilla is still not there while Netscape 4.x series is dead. And now StarOffice gets delayed as well.
I know this is pure speculation and very coincidential and perhaps not at all related. But it worries me a bit.
When Hemos says it'll be out in the same timeframe as Office 2000, what I think he meant was it'll be out in the same timeframe as the internet version of Office 2000. Yes, Office 2000 has been out for a while now.
Microsoft Office 2000 Premium w/ Intellimouse. :)
Office 2000 $359.95
Microsoft's Tech support for the Office 2000
Tech Support Priceless?
If you are running 97 and someone saves in 2000 format you will have a lot of trouble! Office 97 has 2 patches available make sure they are both installed. The 2nd patch fixes problems with Office 2000 compatibility.
-Tom
(You are complaining... why? If you're actually any good I can get you a job yesterday. In this economy, with some of the developers I know we have signed up recently being in their late 30's-early 40's, I have to assume that any C++ unemployment is by choice.)
StarOffice is becoming another Sun fiasco and will hopefully be ignored once AbiWord, Gnumeric, Achtung, and the like (or their KOffice equivalents) are finished.
StarOffice is great, but Sun will do their best to screw it up, and no one needs a PhD in anything to predict that.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Office apps over the net ??
Considering that it sometimes take me 20-30 seconds to just get the front page for hotmail or AltaVista (and that's on a 128k ISDN line), just the thought of having to load the word framework and dialogs makes me sick.
I'm running here on a Ultra-5 on a 100 MBps local network and FrameMaker is soooooooo slow.
Apps on internet ? Well, maybe when everybody's got T1 lines or better, and the servers are CRAY XMP's.
I tried to migrate to Star Writer 5.1a from Word and here is what I found:
- Simple (grid-like)tables seem to import/export without problems
- Complex tables (anything containing a merged cell)
import with varying degrees of success. You usually have to spend a few
minutes with each table to cleaning them up.
- Star office is able to import some corrupted Word files that cause Word
to crash
- Heading tags import but sometimes the numbering is messed up
(easy to fix)
- Fields, headers, and footer imported well
- Pictures came over but were messed up. Some of the lines were missing
and boxes appeared around all of the text. Also, it was impossible to edit
the pictures once they were on the Star Office side.
- I tried to use the Master Document feature but it crashed with the second
document I tried to link in.
- Exporting back to word, none of the pictures made it.
- Exporting back to word, complex tables were converted to newline
separated text.
In short, as much as I like Star Office and see its potential IMHO it isn't
ready for industrial strength corporate use yet (neither is Word for that
matter). For individual documents created and edited by Star Office, it
seemed quite stable and robust but don't expect to convert from Word
without a lot of pain unless your document is pure text. I certainly hope they
get the bugs ironed out since the general concepts, look, feel, and design
are excellent. In the meantime, we're looking at Framemaker.
--
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
They really should have said something about the fact that the article was about the web-enabled versions rather than the normal ones.
Personally, I don't see *any* reason you would want to run an office suite off the 'net. Just makes it easier for them to deny you access to critical software so that you go out of business. (Outta be great for M$, whenever they want to control a new market, they just make sure that the competitors are using O2K web version, and poof, they no longer can make documents.)
Maybe running one off a local server, like X can work, would make sense, but not for anything but *maybe* a spreadsheet, or a database. But since hard drives are dirt cheap, why would you want to waste your bandwidth like that? You'd have to upgrade to gigabit just to survive. I mean, 100 single user version licenses probably don't cost any more than 100 multi-user server licenses. Oh well.
... and I tell you, it isn't very different from Office98. So if StarOffice comes out with more improvements over Office2000, it is not such a bad idea to let the release date slip a couple of months; they'll have some time to steal ideas and all that happy stuff.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I have hard time understanding how the hell one is supposed to use office soft over the net. ...
In fact, this sounds pathetic to me. We have powerfull CPUs with lots of memory and the only thing most people don't have is a decent pipe to the internet. Where is the logic in that?
I can understand Sun's position ( they truly hate PCs) but I think MS is making big mistake being drawn into this "race"
Anyone here who actually looks forward to this kind of computing ??
Any comments ?
I wouldn't fancy downloading the 5 MB Word EXE file (not to mention all the accociated DLLS) just to type up a letter
My understanding of how web-based applications work is that the application code stays on the server - and the user inteface is presented to you over the web by some means. This of course implies that you have to pay for time and space on the server in some way. Maybe just by reading ads?
The whole idea isn't completely ridiculous - look at the phenomenal success of web mail. But it's still somewhat ridiculous. Why would you ever want to do that when you can run the apps on your PC, or telephone (next years model:) or whatever. Especially - why would you want to pay good money for the privilege? I imagine there will be a few people - on the road or whatever - that can get access to a browser but not an office suite and therefore would be able to get some use out of something like this, but they would be few in number compared to the massive hordes of people with laptops onto which the applications can be loaded in the usual way. I have to ask again: what is the reason that people would pay good money for this?
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The SEC filing specifically states that the delay will be until 2nd half of Sun's fiscal 2000 year. However, Sun's fiscal 2000 year is 1st July 1999 to 30th June 2000. In other words, this means the final product will be out and shipping in volume by the 1st half of calender 2000. The beta will be coming out by the end of this year.
Still, it does mean StarPortal will be 3-6 months later than previously stated...
on a happier note, Sun have had over 1,000,000 StarOffice 5.1 downloads in the last 2 months. See Press release. They have a download counter on their homepage, or go here for a direct link to the image. They also have a download counter for Java 2 SDK, and Solaris - though in the latter case, this is the number of "Free Solaris" orders... not downloads...