Synopsis
StarOffice appears to have most of the features and functionality to suit the majority of current MS Office users. Currently, the product is free and is available for a variety of platforms. The product must be considered in a state of flux right now, however, considering its recent purchase by Sun, and the potential direction that company may be taking it in. Its browser metaphor, desktop presentation, and menu differences will present varying levels of challenges, depending on the skill level of the end user. The menu differences will to some extent invalidate the University's recent CBT investment, which includes modules for MS Office.
Recommendation
Background
Earlier this year, an article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, gave an overview of a product called StarOffice. The product is an office suite developed by a German company that was founded in 1985, and is sold to schools, colleges, and businesses in Europe. It contains modules for word processing, spreadsheets, charting, and presentations, among others, and has some appeal as an alternative to Microsoft Office.
One of the attractions of the product was the price, which, at the time of the article, was $995 for a site license. Another was that it was cross-platform, and supposedly ran on MACs, Wintels, SUNs, LINUX, and OS2.
The article indicated that about a dozen institutions were evaluating the product, which at that time was just beginning to be introduced to the U.S. higher-education community. The article generated interest in the product on the part of Physics and SEAS here at the University of Rochester, and subsequently, ATS purchased a site license for the product.
Approach
A number of ATS employees installed and made a brief evaluation of the product. One had it installed and running for a while on a SUN/Solaris machine, but it eventually stopped functioning. He was not able to determine why. Another installed it on a Mac but was not successful at getting it to run. (The current version was not released for the Mac yet, so he used the JAVA version, but that requires a server-side component running on a network, which is why he could not get it to run.) He indicated that the installation process was not at all user-friendly. Another installed it on a 486-class Wintel machine. While the installation was successful, and the product worked as advertised, it was extremely and unacceptably slow. The final installation was on a Pentium-class Wintel machine. Installation and performance were both judged to be good on this machine.
In addition, the institutions mentioned in the Chronicle article were contacted for feedback, along with Cornell, which was also known to be looking at the product. Finally, various trade journal articles were also examined for comments on the product.
Analysis Summary
StarOffice is more than just an application suite, as it also provides a "front-end" on top of the standard Windows (on a Wintel machine) front-end. In doing so, it "takes over" the desktop presentation, including the Windows Start Button, and presents its own version of these. The metaphor that is used in this presentation, and indeed in each of the modules, is a browser metaphor. As such, it is a little different from what people are used to in the standard Windows environment.
The individual modules provide similar functionality to the standard Office products, although in the aforementioned browser metaphor. The key word here is similar. For instance, the menus of the products are similar, but not the same. In some instances, items that appear in MS Office do not appear in StarOffice. StarOffice menus also feature additional functionality that does not appear in MS Office. Samples from some MS Word menus and the comparable StarWord menu are included with this document as examples.
Trade Journal Reviews
A few brief reviews of StarOffice were found in trade journals. Pertinent comments follow.
"The individual applications are quite robust, but the setup program is flawed, and the StarDesktop tends to takeover your PC. StarOffice earns high marks for innovation, but it still has too many rough edges." ö PC Magazine 7 June 1999
"Sun's "StarOffice" is a well-developed, smooth-running, good-looking and nicely integrated package comprising a word processor and web-page editor, spreadsheet, database, calendar/scheduler, presentation maker, drawing and graphics tools, an email client, newsgroup reader, and a browser." ö The LangaList 9 September 1999
"Using StarOffice requires a little more of a learning commitment than the others (suites). The suite is tightly integrated--perhaps too much so--into a central interface that combines the organizational elements of Windows Explorer and the navigational feel of a Web browser. The interface is fine if you're willing to jump into StarOffice with both feet, but it's not very intuitive for occasional use." ö PC Magazine 24 May 1999
"·..for StarOffice to catch on, there has to be a special reason to use it. There's nothing special to make me want to switch to StarOffice, however, and that's the rub. There's nothing here tempting me to leave Corel WordPerfect or Microsoft Excel or Freelance Graphics. The biggest appeal of the suite will be for those watching every penny. Otherwise, StarOffice is nice but not exceptional enough." ö Windows Magazine 21 September 1999
"If all this sounds too good to be true, it is--at least for anyone who must work with a lot of Microsoft Office documents. I wasn't able to test StarOffice's many capabilities in detail, but casual exploration revealed serious compatibility problems. Though Star Division promises "seamless and easy interoperability" with Office, I discovered numerous instances where StarOffice programs displayed or printed Office 97 files incorrectly, or at least differently than the corresponding Microsoft programs. StarWriter seemed the least compatible." - PC World 16 December 1998
Other institutions
From Cornell 9 April 1999:
"But -- and this is a big but -- the Mac version is currently at 4.0, a rev behind the other platforms, and Sonja said that further development on the standalone Mac version was looking doubtful. She told us we should bug Apple, from whom they need more development support."
"There will continue to be Mac support for the server-based version. Turns out that, as an alternative to installing StarOffice as a standalone product, you can also run it off an NT or Solaris server in conjunction with a proprietary thin client. This, or the Java version, is what they are currently recommending for the Macintosh. The campus license would allow us to run both the standalone and the server products."
"Note that there's no download version or eval kit for the Java version."
From the University of Southern California 24 August 1999:
"·we haven't deployed it as widely as I thought we would at the time of the article. The reasons are many, among them a big one is that it 'takes over your machine' kind of feeling when you run this on a SUN workstation. Few of the UNIX only folks have felt this was a positive direction. Next it seemed to run slower then we'd have liked on our systems. I'm sure there are config parameters that would make this work better, but without folks begging for the software, the system tweakers are not motivated to hunt down the needed changes."
"We've had a bit of resurgence in interest lately, again for compatibility with MS Office documents. We'll continue to work it but I far less hopeful than I once was, MS doesn't have to worry too much about this taking over their market. On the other hand, I saw some trade rag piece which suggested that IBM almost bought StarOffice some time ago and that SUN continues to make cooing noises about taking them over. I think their JAVA implemented suite of StarOffice is an interesting direction but again the size and complexity of the whole package is a put off to the very folks we'd like to be interested in this."
"Over all, it isn't as much of an answer to MS Office as we'd hoped."
Current Status
In late August, Sun Microsystems purchased Star Division Corp., makers of StarOffice. Sun plans to turn the StarOffice suite of applications into services that users can access through any browser from any device. That's the heart of Sun's StarPortal initiative, in which it plans to sign up Internet and applications service providers to offer the Star products as part of their network service offerings. The current versions of the product are now available for download for free from the company web site.
While Sun claims that they are going to actively develop the Mac version, all current references to the platforms that the product runs on (or will run on) mention Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS/2. There is no mention of a Mac-specific version, only a Java-based server version which could service Macintosh machines.
The original interest in the product on the part of the U of R Physics seems to have dimmed, and they did not pursue putting the product into their lab, remaining instead with MS Office.
Participants
Cornell University
University of Rochester
Al Padeletti - Manager Desktop Consulting Services (pdlt@mail.rochester.edu)
Chris Harrison - Desktop Computing Consultant
Joe Connorton - Operating Systems Analyst-Programmer
University of Southern California
Last Updated: January 6, 2000