Sun Microsystems releases StarOffice for Mac OS X

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 19 November 2008 02:20

IT Industry - Development

Sun Microsystems has announced the availability of its StarOffice 9 productivity suite for Mac OS X. The news comes just one month after the open source equivalent of the latest StarOffice, OpenOffice 3.0 announced support for the Mac platform.

The news is a small ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy year for Sun, which finds its proprietary hardware business being continually squeezed by cheap commodity server platforms.

The latest version of StarOffice comes with Mozilla's Thunderbird email client and Lightning extension for calendaring as part of its distribution.

According to Sun, the new suite includes many extensions that make it easier to perform common tasks such as editing PDF files, creating reports, blogging, and publishing wikis. Additionally, Sun Services promises to provide enterprise tools to assist customers who are migrating from Microsoft Office to StarOffice 9.

"With every release, StarOffice becomes a more powerful, effective productivity tool. The latest, StarOffice 9, is especially notable for how well it deals with various file formats," said Jonathan Eunice, Founder and Principal IT Adviser at Illuminata.

"In addition to its native ISO-standard Open Document Format, it has strong support for Microsoft Office -- both legacy and new OOXML files -- and for PDF, which can now be imported and edited."

According to Sun, StarOffice 9 comes with a new start center, new icons and a host of usability improvements. New features include multiple page editing in Writer, an optimization Solver tool and 1024 columns in Calc, native table support in Impress, and effective handling of poster-size graphics in Draw.