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Corel%squots WordPerfect Suite 8 Coming in June

Corel tries aggressive pricing, licensing offers in bid for market share.

By Jeff Walsh, PCWorld   

The suite, which comes in standard and professional flavors, features WordPerfect 8, Quattro Pro, Presentations, Envoy Viewer, a Netscape browser, and 1000 fonts.

When the Professional Edition ships later in the summer, it will contain Corel Central, a groupware e-mail and messaging product that will ship with Netscape%squots Communicator. Corel Paradox and Corel Timeline will also be part of the Professional Suite.

CorelCentral will available free to people who buy the standard suite.

In an effort to gain market share, Corel is also unveiling the Corel License Program Freedom, which will enable companies to add users throughout the year without having to report the new licenses. Corel will ask companies to check in yearly with the number of licenses it needs.

Industry analysts said Lotus and Corel will have to be innovative in pricing, technology, and licensing if they want to steal any market share away from Microsoft.

According to Dataquest%squots preliminary numbers for 1996, Microsoft Office dominates the market with an 86.4 percent share, compared to Lotus SmartSuite%squots 7.2 percent share and Corel%squots 6.4 percent share for WordPerfect.

Corel has streamlined the suite in this latest upgrade. It now features the same icons, menus, tool bars, and property bars across all applications.

PerfectExpert, which makes its debut in this release, will combine interactive help and wizard technologies to help users with the tasks and tools with which they need assistance.

WordPerfect 8 also features a %dquotshadow cursor%dquot that makes intelligent decisions based on user input. For example, if a user clicks on the right side of the screen, WordPerfect will right-justify the text.

WordPerfect Suite 8 costs $375 with a $179 upgrade for current users. No pricing is available yet for the professional edition.