SoftMaker Office Bests OpenOffice.org as the Better Office Alternative

SoftMaker Office 2009: An underdog with bite If OpenOffice 3.1 is the overhyped contender with the glass jaw, then SoftMaker Office 2008 is the plucky unknown quietly pounding on a side of beef in some meat locker (sorry, Rocky). Though not as ubiquitous as the free open source community's favorite son, the commercially developed SoftMaker Office has proven itself to be a more viable competitor to Microsoft Office, especially in the low-end PC and mobile computing space. That's because the German company behind the product, SoftMaker GmbH, has made a concerted effort to keep the SoftMaker Office code base lean and mean, while at the same time delivering a remarkable degree of functionality.

[ Compare how OpenOffice.org 3.1 and SoftMaker Office 2008 handled our complex Office documents. ]

The net result is a product that's a fraction of the size of its competitors (just 70MB on disk) and that runs great on underpowered hardware. SoftMaker Office's component applications -- TextMaker, PlanMaker, and SoftMaker Presentations -- load almost instantly, and each consumes roughly half as much memory as their Microsoft Office equivalents. More importantly, SoftMaker Office demonstrates excellent word processor data file interoperability, including successfully loading, rendering, and saving our Microsoft Word 2003 torture test document.

This is a huge accomplishment for a tiny (17 people) company with limited resources. With its TextMaker application, SoftMaker has achieved what the combined forces of Sun Microsystems and the whole of the free open source community could not: reliably exchanging data files with Microsoft Word. Sadly, the suite's interoperability prowess doesn't extend to Microsoft Excel workbooks. Just as OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to preserve the complex SQL connection plumbing that was used to drive my test workbook's external data links, SoftMaker's spreadsheet component, PlanMaker, likewise stripped out all of the link parameters. The resulting spreadsheet, though structurally intact, was essentially a collection of static cells. And as with OpenOffice's Calc, any subsequent save operation from within PlanMaker meant that those connection parameters were lost for good.

I belabor this point because, despite the myriad whizz-bang features and nifty timesavers that make up a modern spreadsheet application, it is ultimately a product's ability to access and manipulate business-critical data sets that defines its utility. And in the case of number crunching under Windows, Microsoft has set the bar quite high by incorporating extensive data integration features and encouraging customers to build ever more complex applications that feature Excel as the front end (see "Why is Microsoft Office is so hard to kill?" for more on this).

The SoftMaker folks say they're aware of this and are working to expand PlanMaker's connectivity with future releases. In the meantime, SoftMaker Office 2008 remains an attractive product, especially for IT shops with limited use of external data. Its lightweight architecture and zippy performance on low-end systems make it a good alternative to Microsoft Office in mobile environments. And the inclusion of BasicMaker -- a scripting engine compatible with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) -- means it's easy for in-house developers to migrate at least some of their custom solutions to the SoftMaker platform. Add to this a modest price point of $79.95 per seat and you begin to see why I believe SoftMaker Office is the hidden gem of the productivity suite category.

As of this writing, SoftMaker was preparing its next-generation suite, SoftMaker Office 2009. The product was still in beta at press time, but my limited experience with an early build left me impressed by the development direction. For starters, SoftMaker Office 2009 will support importing data files from Office 2007 in its native Open XML format. And from what I could glean while experimenting with the beta code, the process works far better than under OpenOffice.

For example, TextMaker 2009, which successfully imported and rendered my Word 2007 test document, included virtually all of the inline charts and drawings. SoftMaker plans to provide similar support for Microsoft Excel 2007 workbooks (but still no external data access) and PowerPoint 2007 presentations, in addition to introducing its first foray into the client database category with its new DataMaker 2009 product, essentially a Microsoft Access work-alike.

[ See the sidebars to this review: Office-compatibility torture test | The many faces of OpenOffice | Why is Microsoft Office so hard to kill? ]

Bottom line: SoftMaker Office shows that good things often still come in small packages. The product's compact footprint and low overhead make it ideal for underpowered systems, and its excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats means it's a safe choice for heterogeneous environments where external data access isn't a priority. With a promising beta release just around the corner, SoftMaker's star is definitely on the rise.

King of the hill Microsoft Office has been king of the desktop productivity hill for decades now, and its reign shows no sign of nearing an end (see my preview of Microsoft Office 2010). For users who need only the most basic compatibility with Office formats, a number of offerings (SaaS apps from Google and Zoho, as well as IBM Lotus Symphony, and other OpenOffice variants, and OpenOffice.org and SoftMaker Office of course) may do the trick. But for shops needing deeper compatibility with Microsoft Office -- to support complex documents, macros, and back-end links -- there's still no substitute.

Frankly, from Microsoft's perspective, the danger may have been overstated. Though the free open source crowd talks a good fight, the truth is that they keep missing the real target. Instead of investing in new features that nobody will use, the team behind OpenOffice should take a page from the SoftMaker playbook and focus on interoperability first. Until OpenOffice works out its import/export filter issues, it'll never be taken seriously as a Microsoft alternative.

More troubling (for Microsoft) is the challenge from the SoftMaker camp. These folks have gotten the file-format compatibility issue licked, and this gives them the freedom to focus on building out their product's already respectable feature set. I wouldn't be surprised if SoftMaker got gobbled up by a major enterprise player in the near, thus creating a viable third way for IT shops seeking to kick the Redmond habit.

In the meantime, Microsoft's position atop the desktop productivity heap remains secure. If anything, OpenOffice's latest failure bolsters the behemoth's seemingly unassailable position. And now we have Office 2010 making an appearance (albeit unofficially), and it seems to have addressed many of the remaining usability and integration complaints. Add it all up and it translates into what should be a long, uninterrupted reign for the royal Redmondians.