InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Connections
Like Office's Outlook, StarOffice comes with a set of personal information manger tools: StarSchedule, an address book based on StarBase; StarMail, an embedded Web browser; and StarDiscussion, for reading news on the Internet.

StarSchedule manages events (e.g., appointments) and tasks. The product includes a server component to provide a way to coordinate events and tasks between members of a group. StarSchedule displays your personal calendar in a number of formats, including single-day, five-day, and seven-day weekly calendars in both detailed and summary views, and a one-month summary calendar. You can specify tasks' start and end times as well as other involved people from your address book. The StarSchedule interface also supports drag-and-drop action that lets you create links between a scheduled event and a document, spreadsheet, E-mail message, etc. StarSchedule also supports exchanging data with a 3Com PalmPilot. Overall, it's a good tool for managing a daily schedule.

The address book, however, is a weak tool for managing contacts. Though well-integrated throughout StarOffice's applications, it can't be easily accessed from other tools.

StarMail and StarDiscussion are adequate tools for accessing the Internet, but they're not exactly awe-inspiring. The StarOffice Web browser supports JavaScript scripting and Java applets via Sun's Java Run-time Environment 1.1, which is also included on the CD. All three tools combine to act as an adequate replacement for Internet Explorer--or Netscape Navigator, for that matter--but nothing to make you want to change from those freely available programs.

Why Bother?
If you're an Office user, is it worth it to migrate to StarOffice? The answer is really about whether you are determined to upgrade to Office 2000. If you had planned to upgrade but don't need most of the features Microsoft has included in Office 2000, StarOffice provides a less-costly migration path. Because the feature set is so similar to Office, users will lose little time getting acquainted with StarOffice. Except for the StarOffice Desktop user interface, the individual programs are very similar to those included with Office, and files created with StarOffice can be easily exchanged with users of Office and vice versa.

If you don't have Office or are considering changing over to Linux for your desktop operating system, or if you would like to deploy some Linux and are looking for a single product you can deploy in both Linux and Windows, StarOffice is a worthy competitor to Office 2000 Standard Edition. You won't get some of the integrated Web features that are now part of Office, but you'll get a solid product that includes the important features you'll want from an office suite. And you'll spend about half as much on it.