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Price, features make software an alternative to Microsoft Office
It's a gamble. Stick with the tried-andtrue Microsoft Office, despite its high price tag? Or move to a more affordable alternative office suite? Sun Microsystems is trying to tip the scales in favor of the alternative with its release of StarOffice Version 8.0, an impressive collection of software that will make you seriously consider making the switch.
At a top price of $100 per seat and much lower prices for volume purchases, StarOffice 8 is far cheaper than Microsoft's product. Sun has not, however, lowered the cost by skimping on features. The suite comes with Writer; Impress, a presentation program; Calc, a spreadsheet program; Draw; Base, a database program; and Math. If you buy the enterprise toolkit, you also get a set of tools to help with backend installation and migration issues.
StarOffice 8, along with its sister program, the free OpenOffice.org Version 2.0, adheres to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards' OpenDocument standard, an Extensible Markup Language standard created by a consortium of companies to forge a common development environment for office suites. Compliance with that standard is particularly important for government users because it ensures that documents will be compatible with any office suite that adheres to the standard. Although Microsoft began using XML with Office 11, it has not yet decided to make future versions adhere to the OpenDocument standard.
Massachusetts has announced a plan that requires all documents to be stored in an OpenDocument...