Sun has announced the end-of-life (EOL) for StarOfficeTM 5.2 Application Suite. In May, Sun announced StarOfficeTM 6.0 and StarSuiteTM 6.0 Office Suite, part of the SunTM ONE software offerings. This announcement removes 12 languages, including English and UK, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Portuguese and Russian. The platforms supported were SolarisTM 8, 7, 2.6 and 2.5.1 Operating Environment (Solaris OE) (SPARCR Platform Edition) and (Intel Platform Edition), Linux and Windows.

The last order date is February 14, 2003, while the last ship date is May 16, 2003. The StarOffice 5.2 Application Suite was designed for the government, enterprise and educational groups.

The replacement 6.0 version offers seamless integration with native desktop environments (CDE, Windows, GNOME, KDE) and features XML as default file format. Files in Writer (.sxw), Calc (.sxc), Impress (.sxi, .sxp), Draw (.sxd), Math (.sxm) are saved in XML-based file format. The Document converter converts binary StarOffice software and MS Office files to StarOffice 6.0 software XML-based file format. This means any editor that supports XML can be used to read/edit/save StarOffice 6.0 software documents. File sharing is much easier with XML-based file formats and compressed file sizes are smaller than 5.2 files. It works with any standard XML tools to create Web-ready documents

StarOffice 6.0 software is compatible with StarOffice 5.2 software. StarOffice 6.0 software can read StarOffice 5.2 software files and save in StarOffice 5.2 software format. However, Version 5.2 is not able to read version 6.0 files.

Version 6.0 offers access to the complete Unicode character set. It comes with a text filter to create 16-bit characters for Unicode-based text files. This allows easy combination of Western text, special characters from non-Western languages, diacritical marks etc. and promotes multilingual documents since only one character set needed for all languages.

There are also GUI improvements in dialogs, layouts and menus. Charting, gallery and graphics tools are accessible by each component in pull-down menus that allow images, graphics etc. to be quickly dragged and dropped into documents to increase productivity.

Also new: templates for finance, business plans etc., sample files for flyers, presentations, animation, clip-art, graphics and images and new fonts offering support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Customer on a 'software only' StarOffice 5.2 software contract have already received StarOffice 6.0 software as part of their contract plan. Other customers would need to purchase StarOffice 6.0 software.

The standard Sun Support EOL Policy applies. The product will be supported for three years after last ship date on contract and for further two years on time and materials basis. [...read more...]

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