OpenOffice.org 1.0 Review Everything But Outlook? Eric Grevstad
Everything But Outlook?
OOo (as it's winsomely abbreviated) is the free-to-distribute, free-for-programmers-to-tinker-and-customize sibling of StarOffice 6.0, which Sun Microsystems will launch later this month for under $100. (Sun gave StarOffice 5.2 away free, but wants to reassure corporate customers that it has a business model and support plan for 6.0.)
(Update 5/15/02: Sun has announced that StarOffice 6.0 will be available May 21 at a retail price of $76, with enterprise customers paying $25 to $50 per seat based on volume and educational institutions paying only the cost of the CD-ROM and shipping.)
Both suites include word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing applications — separate programs, dropping the ponderous, integrated approach of StarOffice 5.2, which tried to replace everything from your Web browser to the Windows desktop. In addition to fee-based support, StarOffice 6.0 adds some extra fonts and import/export filters (notably for WordPerfect) and a database program akin to Microsoft Access.
Neither package, however, includes an e-mail/calendar program akin to Microsoft Outlook (although OOo installs your Outlook address book as a mail-merge data table), so you shouldn't view OpenOffice.org as a perfect, polished replacement for Microsoft Office. But you should view it as leagues ahead of Software602's freeware 602Pro PC Suite or smaller open-source efforts like AbiWord — and even, with all respect to Corel and IBM, as a challenger with more momentum than the vanquished WordPerfect Office and Lotus SmartSuite.
