As users grumble about Microsoft's software licensing charges, Eric
Doyle assesses an open source alternative for corporate
desktops
Decision time is drawing near as Microsoft's 31 July deadline for
companies to sign up to its new licensing scheme approaches. Those
hardest hit will be smaller businesses that lack the bargaining
muscle to negotiate special deals.
One course of action being considered by a number of companies is
to partially abandon Microsoft Office in favour of an open source
software answer.
The current focal point is the open source productivity suite
Openoffice, which has also been released as a commercial package -
Staroffice - by Sun Microsystems. Both suites are available for
Windows operating systems, so adoption does not mean abandoning the
Windows environment for Linux or Unix.
They also offer the possibility of rolling out the same suite
across Windows, Linux and Sun's Solaris Unix. However, using these
suites does mean giving up some of the advanced features offered by
Microsoft Office.
Sun claims that Staroffice's £52.99 price tag is justified because
of the extras it offers and the fact that, unlike Openoffice,
technical support is available. The price compares favourably with
Microsoft's price at Amazon.com of more than £400 for Office XP.
Although Sun offers free support forums and FAQs, it does charge
for support by e-mail and telephone. Purchase of Staroffice allows
one free support incident but after that it charges £14.50 for
e-mail support and £18 for any future enquiries.
Unlike Openoffice, Staroffice has database support and comes with
clipart and other "add-ons" such as document templates and extra
designs for the presentation software. The database support takes
the form of Adibas, which allows connection to existing databases
with either a dBase format or JDBC/ODBC interfaces. It will also
allow data from an existing address book to be made accessible to
the suite's applications.
Probably the best way of looking at these alternatives is that
Openoffice corresponds roughly with the Standard Edition of
Microsoft Office, while Staroffice equates to the Professional
Edition - but with some important differences.
The principal difference is that Microsoft Office comes with
Outlook, a combined e-mail and scheduling package. There is no
e-mail support in either of the open source suites. Sun recommends
using Netscape, but there is also the possibility of using Outlook
Express, which comes free with Windows.
Another difference is in the facilities offered within the elements
of Staroffice.
Microsoft Office is designed for the power user who needs data
sharing and collaboration capabilities - the majority of users do
not require any of these features.
Those who need Web publishing capabilities will find Staroffice a
rather poor alternative, with no equivalent of Microsoft Frontpage
to turn to. Documents can be saved as HTML files in Staroffice's
Writer word processor but there is no help given on how to publish
these to a Web site.
One benefit that Staroffice brings is its native file format, which
is based on XML. This means that the document format has a high
degree of portability and future-proofing. It also means that files
are about a quarter of the size of equivalent Microsoft-format
files.
For anyone with an investment in Microsoft file formats, there is
excellent support both for loading and saving these files in
Staroffice. Sun cannot guarantee 100% compatibility but the
import/export capabilities in all of the suite's applications are
the best available. Sadly, there is no support for Smartsuite
formats.
Staroffice Writer is probably the best feature of the suite. It
offers most of the facilities of Microsoft Word, allowing tables of
contents, footnotes, headers and bibliographies. On top of this, it
takes Microsoft's autocorrection facilities to a higher level by
offering not only on-the-fly spell checking but also autocompletion
of words.
As you type, the system remembers words that have been used and
will offer the complete word after the user has typed in four or
five letters. If the offered word is not the required one,
continuing to type will remove the highlighted offering. It does
take a little getting used to but, once mastered, it can speed up
the slower typist's efforts considerably.
One weak point of Writer is the lack of a simple macro development
environment. Starofficebasic is not a patch on Microsoft's macros
and requires a high degree of skill.
Staroffice Calc is beginning to look like Microsoft Excel but
without the Web-linking features. Formulae can be developed without
the need to refer to column and row numbers. For example, something
like D15 + P24 can become total cost + VAT. Calc also has a version
of the pivot tables used in Excel, where columns and rows can be
repositioned to offer new insights into the data on display.
As far as compatibility with Excel files is concerned, Calc seems
to do well, but where there is heavy use of graphical data
representations the images may need a bit of tweaking.
Staroffice Impress is the equivalent of Microsoft's Powerpoint
slide show. It is complemented by Draw, a basic drawing package
that can produce illustrations and diagrams for use in
presentations or within a Writer document.
Slides can be re-ordered by drag and drop and can also have
embedded video or audio to add punch to a presentation. Transition
between slides is also well supported, with more than 50 fades and
wipes available. Thumbnails of the slides, which Powerpoint uses in
a preview pane, are not available.
Like Calc, some of the Microsoft-format files imported into Impress
need to be tweaked, but this is only to be expected. Most imported
files appear to work sufficiently well for this not to be too
worrying.
Staroffice is well worth considering for users who do not make
heavy demands of their productivity suites. Those who rely on
Microsoft macros will have to think carefully about adoption.
Fortunately, with Openoffice being available as a free download, it
offers the opportunity to try before you buy.
The advantage of being able to roll out the same suite across a
range of operating systems is also attractive, although there is,
as yet, no support for the Apple Macintosh. An early version of the
Mac software is in development on the Openoffice.org Web site, but
workers in a mixed environment of Windows and Mac systems could be
better served by Microsoft Office for the time being.
Staroffice is a very capable suite but must still be considered a
budget version. Its £52.99 price tag looks good, especially in
light of the fact that a user can deploy it up to five times on
different PCs for personal use, giving far better value than
Microsoft Office XP.
The downside is that its features lack the polish, Web awareness
and collaboration capabilities of Microsoft Office. However,
Staroffice is a young product and will improve as time passes,
whereas the past two releases of Microsoft Office have shown it to
be a mature product which struggles to show sufficient improvement
to justify upgrading with each release.
Key features of Staroffice 6.0
- Interoperability with Microsoft Office: users can read, write
and edit MS Office files to maintain their current investment
- XML file formats: users can create complex documents and simple
Web pages and are not locked into proprietary formats
- Familiar graphical user interface: only minimal retraining is
needed, but features are found in different menus to MS Office
- Low cost: compared to MS Office, Staroffice has a lot to offer
for little cost.