Johannesburg, 28 Jan 2005
There is little that is more important than choice in terms of stimulating the open market and giving customers access to affordable and reliable products. Nowhere is this truer than in the software industry, and specifically, in the office productivity market.
Typically, office productivity software refers to a collection of programs including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation builder and a database.
Recent price hikes by the one player that has traditionally dominated this sector have served to highlight the requirement for affordable and fully functional alternative offerings; it is patently obvious that lower-income individuals, or companies that are just starting out, can ill afford highly-priced software - some of which carries a price tag similar to that of a desktop computer. Choice prevents a market from being manipulated by a single player - resulting in more price flexibility.
It is therefore important to note that there are indeed alternative office productivity software solutions available, which gives consumers - from the home user through to the large business - the opportunity to select the productivity software of their choice, and benefit from significant price reductions. These are open source products and using them can result in significant savings in terms of capital outlay. This can be as much as R3 000 for the individual, while corporates licensing thousands of iterations of productivity software can benefit from a price reduction that runs into the millions of rands.
What are the options?
Essentially, there are two popular open source-based office productivity software suites available on the market. These are OpenOffice, to which Sun Microsystems is a major contributor, and Sun's own StarOffice suite.
Both products are built on open standards, and both have overcome the most significant barrier to widespread adoption, which is compatibility with MS-Office software. However, there are differences between the offerings.
In 2000 Sun released the source code of StarOffice software publicly through OpenOffice.org, thus initiating the world's largest open source project. The OpenOffice.org community includes over 25 700 individuals subscribed to the mailing lists, and has members working on more than 45 projects and responsible for the ongoing development of OpenOffice.org. More than 40 million copies of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice software have been distributed to date. StarOffice software is based on the OpenOffice.org suite and includes value-added enterprise capabilities and features.
As a completely free offering, OpenOffice provides users with the basics of a productivity suite, including word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programmes. StarOffice retails at a price of R899, and is available at significantly discounted rates for bulk purchases. Sun Microsystems leverages its support and training capabilities to ensure users of the software have recourse should they have any issues, while StarOffice includes far more filters and converters to increase its compatibility with a wider range of products. In addition to the basics, StarOffice includes the open source Adabas D database, a licensed, commercial quality spellchecker and thesaurus, provides the user with 2000 clipart images and about 300 sample documents and templates.
With the addition of the StarOffice configuration manager, the product is ready for enterprise-wide deployments as specific configurations can be implemented depending on the job functions of the users who will access the product, while it offers single sign-on and security features to provide easy access yet reliable protection of information.
OpenOffice does offer wider platform support - it will run on Windows, Linux, Linux PowerPC, Solaris Operating System, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, OS 390 and HP Unix; StarOffice, however, runs on the most popular platforms including Windows, Linux and Solaris.
As an enterprise product, StarOffice is supplied with complete and detailed manuals which have been developed and published by Sun Microsystems.
This is a particularly important feature for businesses, as the process of migrating users from any one software solution to another requires access to thorough processes and procedures.
Essentially, StarOffice is a complete enterprise-level product with value-added features, support and services backed by Sun Microsystems, while OpenOffice is a customisable, open source suite designed to enable users to modify it to their specific requirements.
With these choices available to them, businesses are increasingly noting that they do not have to be held ransom to high prices dictated by a monopoly provider - instead, they have access to highly functional, reliable and proven alternatives - which also offer full compatibility with other products. And these advantages are being extended to the home user too, with the recent announcement that StarOffice is available off the shelf at major retailers, while OpenOffice can be downloaded free from http://www.openoffice.org.
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