OpenOffice 1.0 vs. StarOffice 6.0 4

[fluid11]

I just recently downloaded a copy of OpenOffice 1.0 and have been messing around with it. I'm looking to get away from all M$ products, specifically Windows and Office. They're new licensing schemes are out of control, so I'm looking to replace all the desktops in my company with Linux and OpenOffice, wherever I can.

OpenOffice and StarOffice are both made by Sun, and I here that they are the same thing, except that StarOffice costs $75 while OpenOffice is free. What are the advantages of StarOffice over OpenOffice, since you have to pay for SO6?

ChrisP

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[supershade]

The first reason is that there is some third party code included in StarOffice that cannot be released for free. This is basically filters for opening other file formats, probably including WordPerfect. OpenOffice opens many file formats, however, and far more than I need. Also included may be Adabase, but I would have to check to be certain. The second main difference is that they offer support for StarOffice, while OfenOffice depends on the open source community to support it. These differences make StarOffice more geared toward corporate users.

 

[jnicks]

Star Office also offers support which they claim will make Star Office more acceptable to corporate users, and for someone starting out perhaps the extra $75 for a phone number to call is worth the price.

If it were my company I would consider licensing Star for the help desk and then use OpenOffice.org for all who did not need Star.

If someone has tried this, please let us know results.

J

 

[akohlsmith]

I have purchased SO6 and use both SO6 and OO1 -- there is no noticeable difference between the two

Adabas D is the "Access" component in SO -- it's shite. Complete and utter shite. If you're putting this into a business, set up a nice PostgreSQL server and use ODBC to access it. Hell I do this in MS Office environments!

The much-touted WP filters are NOT available for SO6 Linux at this time, and don't work well at all under Win32. I was very disappointed in this particular aspect of SO6.

SO6 seems to have some better integrated help as well but to be honest there is absolutely no documentation on StarBasic at this time, which is a big kick in the nuts for people like me. The SO support forums are hit and miss. Personally I feel they try to rifle through too many questions in a given day and you rarely get an answer to a difficult question -- more often than not you get a "you just do this and then this and it's done" but the question is never answered.

One BIG thing that I do like about SO6 is the patchsets -- instead of reinstalling the entire office suite to upgrade you just install the patchsets. To me, in an office environment, this alone is worth the $80/seat.

 

[daravl]

Also I understand that the SpellCheck in StarOffice is superior to that included in OpenOffice - the StarOffice SpellCheck is apparently not open source.

Regards,
DA

 

[akohlsmith]

re: spellchecker: I haven't heard that. I do know that it seems to be US English only (I'm Canadian).

One thing that you will all want to do is get an uncrippled FreeType2 library and install it, and then put

export LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libfreetype.so

in your soffice shell script. The fonts become MUCH prettier.

http://www.mixdown.ca/~andrew/preload

has some before and after shots on my system.