-tictech message:
Dear Folks,
Recent developments have brought into focus the desirability of using
free software in place of our more usual proprietary programs when quality
and usability permit.
Of particular interest are the just-released, improved versions of Star
Office by Sun Microsystems and Open Office by Sun and the Open Source
Community. Star and Open Office support the Word, Excel and Power Point
formats. Both products are offered for free to the education community and
both are available for Windows and Linux. Open Office will soon be
available for the MacOSX.
For people familiar with Star Office 5.2, the new 6.0 version is much
improved . The integrated look of Star Office 5.2 and its odd
"beamer" navigation feature has been eliminated - although underlying
modules are still all loaded and ready to run. The resulting product is
much more like the office products with which we are all familiar.
The possibility of retaining the ability to read and write in our
current office formats without incurring the cost of purchasing proprietary
software, could save schools quite a bit of money and free them from the
shackles of one license for one machine.
Here are a couple of pretty good reviews along with some screen shots:
http://www.winplanet.com/winplanet/reviews/4196/1/
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1221
Here are some testimonials in support of Star Office along with some
information about the relationship between Star Office and Open Office.
Zdnet
May 20, 2002
Considering that 80 percent of the people who use office suites use them
for 20 percent of their features, StarOffice is the functional
equivalent of Microsoft Office (as well as WordPerfect Office and Lotus
SmartSuite) for most of us.
Consulting Times:
March 26, 2002
One of the things that is least well understood -- is that this [Sun's
involvement] isn't a one-time drop at OpenOffice.org. We're committed to
the site and the synchronicity between future OpenOffice.org and
StarOffice releases. Our developers develop directly into the
OpenOffice.org code base. Then when we build StarOffice, we take that
base from OpenOffice and add things to it. We are 100% in sync with
OpenOffice.org and we'll stay so.
The kinds of things that we cannot deliver to OpenOffice.org are file
filters, fonts, some linguistic technology, and the database component,
which is a third-party deal we have with Adabas.
Zdnet
May 15th, 2002
We spent some time with StarOffice for both Windows and Linux recently,
and came away impressed.
Computerworld
MAY 01, 2002
SAN DIEGO -- End-user unrest over Microsoft Corp.'s enterprise licensing
plan may prompt some companies to move from Microsoft Office suite to
rival Sun Microsystems Inc.'s personal productivity suite, StarOffice,
predicts Gartner Group Inc. Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst, said some
firms are beginning to weigh the cost and licensing terms of Microsoft's
Office against StarOffice's improving compatibility with Microsoft file
formats and its expected lower pricing.
=================================================
Star Office
http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?cid=82799&parentId=
Open Office
http://openoffice.org
Tony Hand <tghand@seattleschools.org>
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