Office and its rivals
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- Desktop Evolution, October 2002
Microsoft's Office suite dominates desktop computing. There are alternatives, but how do they measure up in terms of features and functionality?
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“I think that if you look at what functionality most people need in an office suite,” says Jonathan Mills, product marketing manager at Sun, “a lot of office suites deliver that functionality. If you look at a few power users, they might use the features that MS Office has that the others don't. Are you happy, having to buy Rolls Royce tools for everyone who's just writing a letter or doing a spreadsheet?”
Mills maintains that the features in StarOffice and, to a lesser extent, OpenOffice are “good enough” for the majority of users and that only power users need MS Office. Since StarOffice can import and export MS Office documents and costs nearly one-tenth of the price, switching the majority of users to StarOffice could save a company a considerable sum.
The suite also has an easier interface, Mills argues, with “things where you'd expect them to be” and a 3D graphics tool that is better than OfficeXP's. “When you work with XP, you soon realise it isn't actually working in 3D at all,” he says. With a fixed XML file format for StarOffice, Sun will not be able to force users to upgrade to maintain compatibility with future releases, promises Mills.
With a price of £53 for StarOffice, and nothing at all for OpenOffice, these packages have economics on their side, even if they cannot do everything Office can do. But analysts always advise buyers to calculate the cost of ownership and not to go by the initial price.
Lotus SmartSuite
Lotus 1-2-3 used to be the most popular spreadsheet package by far, but Excel now has that mantle and 1-2-3 has become just a part of Lotus' SmartSuite.
Powell Smith, a Lotus software product executive, acknowledges this. He says that one of the aims of the Lotus team now is to ensure compatibility with MS Office. “It's something we really focused on with the applications. In this version, for instance, we've added a PowerPoint filter so you can read and write PowerPoint presentations.” It cannot, however, work with Access databases.
SmartSuite is more enterprise-focused than Office. It integrates with SAP, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards' software. Another example: Its personal information manager, Lotus Organizer, interfaces with the Official Airline Guide Travel Information System to access flight and hotel information, build an itinerary, and transfer the itinerary directly into Organizer's calendar and notebook.
The database, Lotus Approach, is also enterprise focused. It provides business intelligence information from standard databases systems, such as Oracle and DB2. It also works better with other Lotus products, such as Notes and Domino, than OfficeXP does.
The software also has some usability advantages, especially for long documents, argues Smith. “Our Infobox technology is a key differentiator. It's a sticky dialogue box that stays on screen while you make changes. You can maintain it while you modify seven or eight tables at a time - and it is context sensitive.” (This is very similar to the palettes used in Office X for Macintosh).
A new version of the suite is due out at the end of 2002, which will include improvements to the look and feel of the software, which has lagged behind since the launch of Windows XP. Support for multiple languages is not as good as OfficeXP's, say users.
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