At a press conference in Boston held almost concurrently with the Microsoft Office97 launch, Corel officials detailed plans to compete against their market foe with a series of suites to include Corel Office Professional 8; WordPerfect Suite 8; Corel Office for Java; and a forthcoming set of specialized offerings for lawyers, doctors, and the construction industry.

At the press conference, Dr. Michael Cowpland, president and CEO, and Chris Biber, technology engangelist-Internet, told journalists that Corel intends to outdo Office97 through Java-enablement; compliance with "open standards;" and continuation of a policy in which Corel's suites are priced only about half as much as Microsoft's.

Corel Office Professional 8, WordPerfect Suite 8, and Office for Java, three suites slated for release in the March to April time frame, will all be strongly enabled with Sun's Java, according to the two Corel execs.

The officials told the press that the JavaBeans-based Office for Java, now available in pre-beta release as a free download from the World Wide Web at http://officeforjava.corel.com, will conform to the 100 Percent Pure Java Initiative.

In fact, the components-oriented Office for Java suite will probably be one of the first products to carry the logo denoting certified compliance with the new multi-vendor Java initiative, Biber predicted.

On the other hand, through an announcement issued earlier this week, Corel's more traditional Office Professional and WordPerfect suites will be integrated in version 8 with the new Communicator suite from Netscape, another major Microsoft rival, Cowpland pointed out.

The existing version 7 editions of the two suites already include a Java-enabled Netscape browser, Cowpland noted.

Integration with Netscape Communicator will add Lotus Notes-like groupware capabilities; plus e-mail conforming to "open standards," according to the CEO.

Calling Microsoft Office97's e-mail system "proprietary" in contrast, Cowpland contended that users of the version 8 Corel suites will benefit from standards like LDAP, POP4, SMTP, and MIME that will support "open" communications across the Internet with users on different mail systems.

Also during the press conference, Biber divulged that the pre-release edition of Corel's Office for Java now contains a presentation component, in addition to the previously announced WordPerfect for Java; Quattro Pro; CorelChart; PIM (personal information manager); and e-mail components.

In a sneak preview of WordPerfect for Java, Biber noted that the graphical user interface (GUI) for the forthcoming product looks somewhat similar to the GUI for WordPerfect for Windows.

Unlike WordPerfect for Windows, though, WordPerfect for Java is written entirely in Java, with "absolutely no OLE (object- linking-and-embedding) code," according to the technology evangelist.

As a result, he asserted, the WordPerfect component and other members of Corel's Office for Java suite can be run straight out of the box on any desktop platform, without modification.

Office for Java is also less "cluttered" than Windows-based software, in terms of both user interface and feature set, according to Biber with a remarkably small file size of less than 6 meg.

WordPerfect for Java contains a new, more streamlined toolbar, for example. In addition, Corel will include only the "essential features" that most WordPerfect customers actually use.

The JavaBeans architecture underlying Office Suite for Java will allow Corel to offer other features as optional components, or "beans," Biber said.

So far, much of the interest in Corel's Office Suite for Java has come from large organizations with multi-vendor desktop clients currently running systems such as Windows 3.1 and Unix. FTD Florists, for example, is one current early user, Biber pointed out.

Migration of multi-vendor clients to Java permits customers to leave their hardware investments intact, according to the two officials.

Organizations might use products from vendors such as Citrix to allow current Windows applications to be moved to the server for access from Java-based clients.

Corel is also looking at the possibility of implementing JavaScript to let users write the kinds of macros traditionally employed.

Cowpland told the press that, also over the next few months, Corel plans to introduce specialized editions of Corel Office for the medical, legal, and construction markets.

The medical market is a "huge" field, with 12 million medical workers in the US alone, according to Cowpland. The new medical edition of Corel Office will include a specialized medical dictionary and thesaurus.

Corel's WordPerfect already owns about 75 percent of the legal market, the company president maintained.

Corel's new suite for law offices will also provide a specialized dictionary and thesaurus; a set of templates for legal documents, and a law office management and accounting system.

Corel expects to price the new specialized suites in the same bracket as Corel Office Professional, the CEO added.

Source: Newsbytes