November 2, 2005

StarOffice - Is it for businesses?

StarOffice, by Sun, is a low cost office suite competing directly with Microsoft Office.

While I don't want to "sell" for Microsoft, realistically speaking 1) they are the STANDARD for business application computing for the most part and compatibility with your business partners and customers is vital 2) Microsoft Office offers a lot of tools and integration.

These are two reasons (probably more) why small businesses should seriously consider all things before deciding to NOT use Microsoft Office.

Having said that, there are MANY other great products on the market, competing with Microsoft Office (as a whole or in parts), such as Corel's Word Perfect Office, Mozilla Thunderbird and so many others.

Small Business Computing reviews Star Office and writes

At some point on the road to creating productivity suites the idea behind office software went terribly awry. Microsoft Office has evolved into an expensive, bloated software package designed for corporations in need of ratified features and, at the other end of the spectrum; you find a few low-end applications suitable for junior-high students putting together a history report.

But what about the rest of us ¬? people who just need enough to do basic business computing, without a lot of fancy bells and whistles? Sun's StarOffice 8 addresses this issue by providing a feature-packed, inexpensive office suite that should suit most small businesses nicely.

StarOffice offers a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a drawing package (Draw), a presentation program (Impress) and a database package (Base) similar to Microsoft's Access. For organizations concerned about migrating their complex Office macros and documents over to StarOffice, the suite's enterprise edition includes a tools package that assesses existing Office documents and converts their macros for use with StarOffice. Read the full review here

0 comments