StarOffice 8 Learns From MS Office

StarOffice 8 Learns From MS Office
By David Worthington, BetaNews
February 17, 2005, 8:10 PM

Basking in the limelight of LinuxWorld, Sun used the occasion to show
off a working mock-up of the next version of its StarOffice
productivity software. In many ways, StarOffice 8 represents the
suite's continued maturation.

Built-in usability enhancements conform to the look and feel of
industry standard functionality, configuration options and language
support is enhanced, and interoperability with Microsoft Office is
more comprehensive. Sun has also has thrown in a newly redesigned
database engine and software development kit (SDK).

In its quest to produce a substitute for MS Office, Sun has taken care
to soften the transition. Usability enhancements are intended to make
the software easier to learn and use, reducing migration and training
cost. Features such as toolbars and menus, down to headers and
footers, resemble Office and have adopted Office terminology.

For instance, "AutoPilot" has been renamed "Wizard." Notable changes
were made to mail merge and a new feature named "Format Paintbrushes"
preserves copy and paste styles like Microsoft Office Smart Tags.

What's more, StarOffice has been programmed to behave as a native
application -- with native widget rendering -- for every supported
operating system such as Solaris, Linux and Windows.

No matter how successful it is at erasing any observable differences
between StarOffice and Microsoft Office, Sun must labor to ensure
seamless compatibility under the hood. The 8.0 release of StarOffice
now has the same set of AutoShapes that Microsoft provides in
PowerPoint, and has vastly improved handling of Excel spreadsheet
files.

Despite it emphasis on Office, Sun has not forgotten third parties.
StarOffice 8.0 has improved PDF support, which for the first time
allows quality selection for images, as well as well PDF exports. Some
new formats such as Xforms are also supported.

Under Sun's guidance, StarOffice has continued to adhere to open
standards. The default file extension for StarOffice files has been
changed to the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards) Open Document Format (.odx). Sun maintains
backward compatibility to StarOffice 7.0 and previous versions.

In addition, Sun has updated its database engine to HSQLDB, which is
open source and Java driven, and has moved to a new front end. Sun
claims that it is now much easier to create forms, queries and
reports. The software supports most major database types and
connectors.

In an appeal to the enterprise, a configuration manager will be
bundled with the Java Desktop Configuration Manager. This tool helps
manage user settings such as profiles, policies, security and
authentication, and access controls.

Since StarOffice fares well overseas and has a broad base of supported
languages, the software also has a multi-language installation feature
that can be selected during installation.

Lastly, Sun has continued its push -- which began with StarOffice 6.1
allows customers to include more functionality or change interface
elements. The updated SDK has included API concepts and sample code
written in several popular 3G languages.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Sta...1108689056