StarOffice 6.1 Takes on the Enterprise
Sun is hinging its bets on StarOffice 6.1 fitting the bill for the enterprise sector, making an early product preview available for a public beta test.
This interim StarOffice release is geared towards businesses, and is being issued conjointly with a software development kit (SDK) aimed at allowing customers to develop custom solutions. Such a move will help StarOffice grow horizontally, enabling Sun to better compete with Microsoft and Corel.
To assist with deployments on a massive scale, Sun has added a new configuration manager to StarOffice that aids in installing and managing the product. Support for accessibility needs is now available, fulfilling a key requirement to win bids on government contracts.
Another key area of interest in 6.1 is additional support for languages in emerging markets such as the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Sun claims that it is working to perfect bi-directional text for localizations, and to honor its promise of adding 10 additional languages in each capstone release.
StarOffice's open source cousin, OpenOffice.org, offers even more language support than Sun's official boxed version. The two builds take a twin track approach, and the betas closely follow one another.
A key component for potential corporate switchers, StarOffice will import and export Microsoft's Office 2003 file formats by the time it hits the shelves. Other features invoked from competitors' recipes for success are a keyboard macro recorder and small device support. Users will also see some revamped dialog boxes designed to be more user friendly.
Like its market counterparts, StarOffice touts XML integration for interoperability between platforms. Sun has been supporting XML since the release of StarOffice 6.0.
Sun claims that it has made gains in performance, stability and application load time. But despite this achievement, bringing StarOffice to market has not been an easy task.
In a public falling out with Linux distributors such as Red Hat and SuSE, StarOffice is no longer shipped with the most popular Linux operating systems. Vendors were livid over Sun's decision to begin charging a fee for the suite, as well as its bundling of some non-open source technologies.
However, Sun hopes modest improvements in version 6.1 will attract additional OEM partners and build upon StarOffice's success in Europe with Sony. Retail versions of StarOffice have traditionally been sold through a network of retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit City and Staples. Pricing is not expected to change from the 6.0 release.
Little current information is available on StarOffice's market share, however the 6.0 release garnered substantial interest. 200,000 individual downloads were completed in the first week alone, according to Sun.
Nate Mook contributed to this report.