Overview

Unlike the desktop-computer world with which many readers are familiar, the world of Unix has long been an environment of collaboration and cooperation. For Macintosh and Windows users, a "freeware" or "shareware" program frequently means an interesting but minimally important program written by one or two people, possibly only as a hobby, and usually having minimal support. Unix users, who have been used to networking for a long time, and to having little commercial software support, think of freeware very differently. Today, on Unix, almost every program of any consequence is freeware, and the source is usually available for users to download and adapt to their needs. Users have banded together to fix problems that arise, and entire virtual communities have sprung up to support and update freely available software packages. The Open Source Initiative grew out of this spirit of sharing and collaboration in an attempt to promote this development philosophy in a platform- and operating-system-independent manner.

In 1999, Sun Microsystems purchased Star Division, a German company that was producing a cross-platform office-productivity suite, and created its current product, Star Office 5.2, from Star Division's product line. Star Office is an office-productivity suite with functions that encompass word processing, spreadsheet calculation, email, collaboration, presentation, graphics, image-processing, scheduling, and database access. Sun Microsystems has also opened development of the Star Office code by making it into an Open Source project. Results that come directly out of the Open Source project will be known as Open Office and will be available without cost as source code, and precompiled for some platforms. The licensing that Sun has applied allows Sun, and potentially other interested companies, to develop commercial offshoots or add-ons, which can be sold as commercial products as well. The current Star Office version is 5.2, and the current Open Office version is build 619, which is based on the Star Office 5.2 code with considerable contributions and updating from the community at OpenOffice.org.

Star Office's tag line is "Do Everything in One Place," and its authors have certainly tried to pack every conceivable office function into a single integrated application suite. The appeal of the product, besides being a widely cross-platform office-productivity suite, lies in the integration of its components. It is designed to allow much tighter integration of content from component to component than is available in other packages. In addition, in the next version of Star Office, the file format underlying the data exchange will be the highly standardized and open XML format. Consequently, users need not be concerned that their data are locked up in a proprietary and closed file format.

Unfortunately, Star Office does not live up to being the phenomenal office application that it set out to be. It contains sufficient bugs and inconsistencies that many potential users are likely to find it not worth the trouble. Still, there's good reason to expect that future releases of Star Office will be considerably better. Sun has had the wisdom to make the development of Star Office into an Open Source project, and this bodes particularly well for its future functionality, because Open Source projects have traditionally taken good ideas and made them into bigger, better, and more popular ideas.

How Long Did It Take to Learn to Use It Productively?

It didn't take more than five minutes of poking around in the interface to create a new text document and begin entering text. Another five minutes and I was doodling figures in the graphics environment and entering them in the text document. The mental model that the user needs to acquire to "live" in the environment, however, would definitely take longer to develop. Completely mastering the system to the point of fluency would take at least a few weeks of living and working continuously with the product.

Product Quality

Customizability

Good.

Ability to Program in Scripts, Add Extension Modules, etc.

Star Office/Open Office includes an integrated programming language that can communicate and exchange data with each of the components. It can also be used to write input and output filters to allow importing and exporting of data into formats that are not yet supported automatically.

Ability to Import and Export in Different File Formats

The currently most supported import and export file formats are directed at compatibility with Microsoft Office. The word-processor component, for example, can handle Word 6, 95, and 97+ formats, as well as HTML, RTF, and plain ASCII text. Since Open Office is volunteer-supported, new filters are being created and made available to the public on a regular basis.

Useful or Unusual Features

Probably the single most important feature of Star Office is one that doesn't exist yet. The Open Office development effort has been changing the product's underlying file format into XML. This data format is standardized and the syntax is open, allowing anyone to write external applications that can read, use, or modify the contents of the files as necessary. If you need a function that does not exist in Star Office, with the 6.0 release you should be able to write an external program that can read the Star Office data file and make the necessary modifications.

For those who can't quite figure out what that would mean to them, imagine being able to write a quick little program that could scan through your email, find all the attached images, collect them all, perhaps pull some data out of a database about the person who sent the image, do some quick cropping of the images, and then wrap it all up into a Web page and publish it for you. You have access to the contents of your files through any software you choose, inside or outside the actual application suite, and you can write something like this easily.

The integration with Internet protocols is also very nice, and some users will find the ability to open and edit documents directly from Web servers or FTP sites to be a considerable convenience.

In version 5.2, Sun has tried to build what might be considered a "mini-desktop" environment entirely inside the Star Office suite. You don't leave Star Office to read email; you read it directly in Star Office. You don't start an external program to pull data out of a database into a spreadsheet; you do that directly in Star Office, too. Functionality that you probably currently think of as being "separate programs on your desktop" are now all "integrated components in the Star Office environment." The word from the OpenOffice.org FAQ, however, is that this "minidesktop" will be dropped in future revisions, making the interface to the product a bit more familiar.

Limitations

Not everything works. A comprehensive list would not fit in this review, but it's a collection of strange little things that go wrong. For example, on some implementations of X Window, the program loses the keyboard focus, and one ends up unable to type into any windows. (If this happens, click around on your window-manager background until you get a menu that contains "Raise and Focus," select this, and then click where you want to type again.) There are also incompatibilities and inconsistencies between the internal data representation and importable/exportable file formats, so it's best not to expect that an imported or exported file will arrive exactly as it originally appeared.

Technical Support and Documentation

Star Office is currently supported by Sun, with a for-pay technical-support package. Open Office is supported by the developer community at OpenOffice.org. Many user-written documentation packages available at OpenOffice.org also apply to the Star Office suite, and Sun has a number of freely available documentation packages as well.

Target Users

Star Office is targeted at users who need a highly integrated office-productivity suite, and who want an alternative to other popular office software. Star Office and Open Office are also being made available on a number of platforms to which large commercial packages have not been introduced, giving users on these platforms an option other than keeping a Macintosh- or Windows-based machine on hand just to perform office-application tasks.