The StarOffice Advantage

Star Division, a small German software publisher, hopes StarOffice 3.0's object-oriented, multiplatform design will propel it ahead of established office suites from Lotus, Microsoft, and WordPerfect

Volker Weber

Will Windows 95 run roughshod over all other platforms? Will NT gain a significant share of the desktop market? What's the future of Unix? Will OS/2 be around in two years? These are not academic questions for software developers; their livelihood depends on guessing correctly which platform users will migrate to one, two, and even five years down the road.

There's a growing consensus, however, that a variety of 32-bit OSes will continue to play a significant role in the computer industry. As software developers use more object-oriented (OO ) tools and designs, multiplatform development is becoming easier. Star Division, Hamburg, a small German software publish er, took the OO path and is now challenging such illustrious office suites as Lotus's SmartSuite, Microsoft's Office 95, and WordPerfect's PerfectOffice.

Star Division's StarOffice 3.0 contains word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications and runs on Windows 95, NT, 3.1, OS/2 Warp, and the Power Mac. Several Unix versions, such as AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux, are scheduled to be released this year. Localized versions for eight European languages and a U.S. version are all currently under development.

One of StarOffice's biggest strengths is that it allows users to work on different platforms with a single document type and also exchange documents seamlessly between platforms. The office suite is based on an OO class library, which Star Division developed over the past five years.

Although the company has been selling a German version of the StarWriter word processor for Windows and OS/2 since 1994, only the multiplatform class library, called Solar, enables it to realize such fast development cycles. "With this OO approach, 60 developers built the whole suite in less than one year," says Andreas Meyer, R&D manager of Star Division. All applications use the same set of DLLs and share more than 60 percent of the code, he adds.

The StarOffice StarWriter, StarCalc, and StarDraw applications compete directly with Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively. In 1994, the latest year that International Data Corp. has figures for, Microsoft Office held 80 percent of the European market, with Lotus's SmartSuite approaching 17 percent and WordPerfect's PerfectOffice (which was recently sold to Corel) at 3 percent.

At present, StarOffice doesn't include a programmable database like SmartSuite's Approach or the Access database in Microsoft's Office Professional. However, thanks to OO programming tools, you can expect to see a StarOffice multiplatform database in the near future.

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StarOffice Stellar Among Office Suites

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StarOffice supports a wide variety of OSes, has a similar interface for its different modules, and will soon be available in several European languages. The office suite includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, and presentation software. (More information is available from http://www.stardiv.de .)