Star Office: A Rising Star By Peter Mok

The Office Tools Evolution

Looking back to the era of WordStar, MultiMate, Freelance, VisiCalc, Lotus 123 and dBASE, these innovative tools helped a lot in increasing the office productivity. People used these office tools to perform basic editing functions, advanced word processing functions, desktop publishing, presentations, spreadsheet calculations and development of database applications.

As more people became aware of the beauty of these office tools and began to use them in their daily lives, a great demand for new features and integration of office tools inevitably came. This led to the emergence of office suites like Lotus SmartSuite, WordPerfect Office, MS Office etc. These office suites had been evolving for several generations. Some flourished, some faded away, while others were acquired or merged as a result of competition. Although many of these tools are great products, a lot of them already disappear from the market today. No one will deny that MS Office is currently dominating the office suite market. As end users, we see this dominance can be rectified by the dynamics of the software industry.

The StarOffice offered by Sun Microsystems in August 1999 gives us yet another fully featured office productivity suite to select from. Perhaps the most remarkable news about StarOffice is that it is FREE! In this article, we shall see the likelihood of how StarOffice can become a rival to MS Office.

The StarOffice

Before Sun’s acquisition, StarOffice (originally developed and supported by Star Division Corp.) has been in the market for more than ten years. The current version, v5.1, is mature and stable. StarOffice is designed for an open and homogeneous workplace that delivers a consistent task-oriented workflow. The StarOffice includes the Writer providing word processor capability, the Calc for spreadsheet applications, the Impress for presentation, the Draw and Image modules for drawing, the Base module for Database functions, the Math for creating mathematics formula, the Schedule for Personal Information Manager (PIM) functions, and Mail and Discussion for e-mail and newsgroups. Other functions include HTML editor and Internet browsing which allow browsing of the Internet and editing of HTML documents. It also supports VB and JavaScript-like languages and Java. Descriptions of all its functions and features can be found in the StarOffice Web pages available in the Sun Microsoft Web site [1,2]. Needless to say, the strength of StarOffice is that its modules are tightly integrated to form a workplace for the desktop environment.

The multi-platform support and interoperable feature also make it more favourable than other office suites. StarOffice runs natively on the Solaris, Windows 95/98/NT, OS/2, and Linux operating environments. Therefore, StarOffice users can interchange any information among these environments easily.

How Users Receive the Suite

The rich features and high quality of this free software has already attracted a large number of home users. Since the announcement in August, there have been more than one million downloads. In addition, Sun also made the media available via various channels. In fact, the StarOffice has already become THE office suite in the Linux world (the top Linux-based personal productivity application suite according to a linux.de poll). It would not be difficult to see it become the product of choice in the Solaris world. We shall wait and see how it will do in the Wintel world.

Ease of Use

The user friendliness and ease-of-use interface provided by StarOffice make it easy for people to understand and use it. By maintaining a common desktop environment, StarOffice allows users to work on the various modules and access all information sources such as documents, databases and the Internet in one single environment. It is also the same environment across different platforms. Therefore, users only need to focus on their tasks without worrying about the behaviour of office tools no matter whether they are using StarOffice on Solaris, Windows, OS/2 or Linux operating system.

External programs or applications can be activated directly in this environment. Users can also customise their own information environment through the use of StarOffice Beamer and Explorer. Users need not leave the environment while working on a different application.

Performance and Resource Requirements

With the rich functions provided, the software only requires 32MB of memory to work on and the whole installation merely occupies 150MB of hard disk space. Even working with the OfficeDraw on 3D objects, multiple light sources with texture mapping can be completed within reasonable time without having any messages like memory-low or insufficient resources. Since the performance is already acceptable with this configuration, additional hardware upgrade is not necessary.

Compatibility and Stability

StarOffice is a masterpiece of cross-platform office suite by maintaining the same user interface across different computer platforms. Besides maintaining cross-platform compatibility, StarOffice supports ample filters for importing other file formats. Among other formats, it can read and save Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents. Although not fully compatible, the StarOffice suite has high compatibility with the Microsoft Office suite.

Vendor’s Support

The success of a product depends very much on the dedication of the vendor. There were cases where very good products failed as a result of company acquisitions or mergers. However, the enormous user population should be a great incentive for Sun to further develop and support the office suite. Sun Microsystems not only promised to support the product, but it will also further develop and integrate the product to become a more productive one - the StarPortal initiative. Moreover, Sun has already announced training sessions on StarOffice.

One thing that has to be addressed is how Sun will maintain the software quality in its future developments. As StarOffice is available on various computer platforms, the complexity will grow to the extent that the development cost may become unaffordable. At the same time, StarOffice is also faced with crucial issues like stability and performance. We shall see how promising the product developments will be in the coming months.

More...

Although the suite already supports a large number of languages, it still lacks the native support of Chinese language. However, when the suite was being tested with Chinese Windows OS and Chinese add-on packages like RichWin, we have no problem reading and inputting Chinese. It is anticipated that the Chinese version will be available early next year.

Although StarOffice includes more basic features than is required for ordinary office work, it still cannot satisfy the need of high-end functionality for complicated work especially in the database module. PC users tend to compare it with Microsoft Office. As user population builds up, the demand for more new features and functionality will undoubtedly increase. It is hoped that Sun will respond to the needs and enhance the product to become a perfect one.

It is known that some popular office suites are susceptible to macro virus attacks. Hopefully Sun has already taken this into consideration before StarOffice 5.1 was released.

Adopting the Suite - Support and Maintenance Issues

Nowadays, organisations are trying hard to lower the cost while maintaining high office productivity. The free offer will surely cut down the cost and is particularly beneficial to small organisations which are flexible enough to adopt this new office suite. On the contrary, large organisations tend to be more cautious in adopting the suite. Careful examination has to be conducted to evaluate the product and to calculate the total cost of ownership before deciding a move. This includes the suitability of the product for department’s use, user training and help desk support. The discussion [6] from the University of Sheffield is a good reference for the analysis.

As more and more people use StarOffice nowadays, we cannot stop them from sending StarOffice documents to our staff and students. In fact, we have already received enquiries on how to read files with extension .sdw, .sdd etc. Although it is too early to adopt the StarOffice as the University standard, with the benefits it brings to users especially those working on multi platform, we see the necessity to support and promote StarOffice. We understand that the wider diversity of software will increase the supporting cost. Luckily, the ease-of-use and the high compatibility of the suite with other popular office suites would reduce the demand for future support. Initially, the CSC will make StarOffice available to all students by installing it on every PC and UltraSparc workstation in the CSC terminal rooms. Departments will also be encouraged to install the suite to their offices, laboratories and terminal rooms such that students and staff can both work on the same StarOffice suite across the various Unix platforms and Windows environment.

References