Glowing StarOffice 8 reviews continue…

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Couple of days ago, Chris Watt posted a review of StarOffice 8 in Software Editorial.

Overall, this is an extremely positive review as Chris notes that StarOffice 8 is not only a great alternative to MS Office but also a better choice over OpenOffice 2.0.  He praises Sun’s technical support throughout his article. Much of his review focuses on the features StarOffice offers versus OpenOffice. He also notes that StarOffice is able to export a file as a PDF which is something MS Office can not do presently. Toward the end of his review he details StarOffice Draw and StarOffce Base and speaks favorable about each application.

Chris concludes his review with this glowing statement: “I cannot think of anything that touches it [StarOffice] for sheer value if you are a business, organization or charity, and if you require good technical support even if you are a home user then this does the job nicely, I have noticed when I have surfed the web that there are many satisfied customers, And I myself are one of them.”

At the end of the review Chris has a link to a couple of positive user testimonials from Burlington Coat Factory and Bristol City Council.

As always, many thanks to the StarOffice 8 team for helping us to secure these great reviews!

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StarOffice 8 honored in eWEEK Excellence Award event

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As I wrote in the On The Record blog, StarOffice 8 is the Productivity Applications category winner in the Sixth Annual eWEEK Excellence Awards program.

Last night I had the honor to attend the award ceremony. Before the award ceremony, I chatted with Peter Coffee, Mike Caton and Deb Donston among others from eWEEK. I learned that there were approximately 800 entries for the award from which 19 winners in different categories were selected. We are truly honored for the recognition!!!

I should note that the entry fees companies submit to eWEEK for these awards go to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and representatives from the Lawrence, Mass. club and the Harlem, N.Y. club were on hand to accept. Ziff Davis donated $55K to the clubs from Lawrence, Harlem, San Francisco and Hurricane Catrina affected areas. Kudos to them for supporting a great cause.

Peter served as the emcee of the event. He introduced the award for StarOffice 8 by highlighting the innovation and value StarOffice 8 brings with integrated word processing, presentation, drawing, spreadsheet and database capabilities at an incredibly affordable price while maintaining compatability with the other dominant office suite in the marketplace. I picked up the award noting that StarOffice 8 is the first commercial office suite to support OASIS OpenDocument format and it also offers enterprise level migration tools that ease the transition. I ended with a call to action of trying out StarOffice 8 for free for 90 days, to which Peter quipped: “Operators are standing by, please call now!” 🙂

Couple of pictures from the event. They didn’t come out great though.

From left to right: Peter introducing StarOffice 8 as the winner, eWEEK Excellence Award for StarOffice 8, me snagging the award.

CONGRATULATIONS to the StarOffice 8 team for the EXCELLENT work!!!

eWEEK publishes Trusted OS feature, highlights Solaris 10

eWEEK‘s Jason Brooks published an in-depth feature story and technical analysis of Trusted Operating systems including Solaris 10, SE Linux and AppArmor.

The feature presents information on new capabilities within each of these OSs that provides security and trusted use. Jason praises Solaris 10 as one of the top operating systems for ‘trusted capabilities,’ particularly the Process Rights Management capabilities.

Additionally, he highlights that “Solaris’ Containers feature to be a much simpler-to-approach means of process confinement, although you can use Containers and Process Rights Management together. While Red Hat and Novell are each working on providing similar functionality through Xen virtualization, the Solaris approach is much leaner, more manageable and, most important, more mature.”

There is also a slide show about the article.

Many thanks to Chris for taking the time to update Jason on the latest in Solaris 10 features.

Another great Sun Ray article in Government Computer News

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There was another great Sun Ray article in Government Computer News last week.

In this review, Brad Grimes comments “Walking up to a Sun Microsystems Inc. Sun Ray thin client and popping in a smart card is actually pretty cool. We did so recently and were more impressed by the responsiveness of the system than anything else (lots of companies make good thin clients) — the card goes in, the applications come up in about the blink of an eye. The new Sun Ray 2 and Sun Ray 2 FS thin clients offer a little something for everyone.“

Check out the complete article here…

Great Sun Ray Review in eWEEK

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Last week eWEEK reviewer Anne Chen posted an extremely positive review of Sun Ray. The review positions Sun Ray as a better overall “true” thin client solution vs HP’s offering (which was reviewed alongside) and other market offerings. The Sun Ray review is accompanied by a great Sun thin-client customer case study featuring US Department of Defense.

Overall, Anne wrote an extremely positive review of the Sun Ray 2FS. She details the fact that the Sun Ray thin-client solution has no moving parts which makes the management of the units greatly simplified.  She further states that the Sun Ray is the only thin client on the market with built-in dual-head connectors.

Anne was more impressed with its power consumption, noting that the until only drew 7.86 watts. She also details the Sun Ray’s flexibility of choice when it comes to operating systems, noting that IT managers can present a Windows, Solaris or Linux environment to end users. She also highlights our Microsoft RDP licensing.

Anne emphasizes throughout the review that Sun is the “only true thin client solution” when compared to other solutions on the market. In addition to HP, she also mentions ClearCube and Wyse Technology as other thin client solution vendors but notes that Sun has the most robust offering.

The accompanying case study details how the DIA launched Sun’s thin clients in an effort to allow intelligence analysts to view data across several classified and unclassified networks from one PC. She notes that ten thousand DOD analysts are currently using the Sun Ray clients, and 8,000 more will be moved to Sun Rays by late 2008.

Overall, great coverage for the Sun Ray product family. Many thanks to Angela, Ranna, Joshua and Mason for making this review a roaring success…

The day I met Jonathan

Last week I was in our Menlo Park campus hosting various visitors ahead of JavaOne (which is just around 50 hours away!!!).

On Tuesday, while going back to the conference room to collect my personal belongings after walking the visitor out of the door at our Executive Briefing Center (EBC), I saw Jonathan coming down the corridor with Noel. I think they were heading to another customer meeting in EBC.

Jonathan knows the Sun Product Reviews Program (and I am proud of the link to this blog from his blog), but we never met personally. I guess Noel sensed that, and promptly introduced me to Jonathan.

After couple of words of encouragement from him, I mastered enough courage to ask him for a photo with him. He agreed, and I started jumping up and down in joy (ok, I did that mentally 🙂 ).

Noel took the picture.

I’m going to frame it. I think it is going down the history lane… Just think of what it will mean in 10 years, 20 years from now…

PRICELESS!!!

Sun Ray Wins Network Computing’s Well-Connected Award

Sun Ray wins the Network Computing’s Well-Connected Award for Design, Innovation or Enhancement in the Network Infrastructure category!

I am absolutely thrilled!!! I do believe what John Siefert of Network Computing had to say about this award: “This is an important distinction from any other award program — the products selectedin the Well Connected Awards have  been tested in an actual business environment and judged by our editors themselves. They are truly innovative solutions that work — and we have the metrics to prove it.“

Verbatim from Network Computing article:

Design, Innovation Or Enhancement
Winner: Sun Microsystems SRSS (Sun Ray Server Software) 3.1
We expected great design, smooth integration or exceptional enhancement from the winner in this category. Sun Microsystems’ SRSS (Sun Ray Server Software) 3.1 delivers all three. SRSS had the best design and enhancement using a server-based computing architecture with cool Sun Ray DTUs (Desktop Units). Combine Solaris 10 and the SunWut package with a Java runtime environment and the SRSS is ready to serve applications to Sun Ray DTUs using Web-based management. In a bandwidth-challenged environment, SRSS uses an aggressive compression ratio to pass I/O from server to thin client.

Check out more about this here.

Congratulations to the Sun Ray Team for the great thin-client product that simply rocks!!!

And lookout for another major review on Monday… 😉

ComputerWorld review of Sun Fire T2000 server

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Last week Martin MC Brown posted a blog review of Sun Fire T2000 server in ComputerWorld.

In this positive review, MC explains that the T2000 is actually faster than anything he needs at the moment.  He says that while he does not require all of the power in the machine, he can think of many companies that can use all of the power provided.  He adds, “it is the power the [T2000] doesn’t suck up in terms of electricity that is more important to me.” 

Per MC, “My T2000, even at peak load, consumes about the same electricity as a dual Xeon I’ve been using for a while, and, despite running at 1GHz instead of the 2GHz of the Xeons, the T2000 is noticeably faster – particularly when very busy (i.e. running multiple threads).“

MC, we’ll get you a Sun Fire T1000 server for your review soon…

Smart Computing designates StarOffice 8 a “Smart Choice”

StarOffice 8 has been awarded the “Smart Choice” designation in a round-up review of alternative office suites  in Smart Computing.

StarOffice 8 was compared with 602PC Suite 4.1, Ability Office Professional 4 and ThinkFree Office 3. The reviewer, Jeff Dodd echoes throughout his review that this latest release delivers big brand functionality at a low cost. He details its quick installation and effortless registration process.  He also discusses all of its features highlighting the fact that each component comes packed with Microsoft-caliber features. Jeff also calls out the fact that registered users get three free phone or email support incidents in their first 60 days of use, “a perk that is virtually unheard of these days.”

Jeff concludes his review with high praise for StarOffice 8, “Nevertheless, quality off-brand office suites are out there. And without a doubt, StarOffice 8 is the best. At less than a quarter of the price of Microsoft Office, the package is definitely worth serious consideration for anyone who prefers cash in hand to a popular brand.”

A big thanks to Iyer, Erwin and Kay for helping to make this review such a success!

Sun Grid in InfoWorld Screening Room

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Jon Udell, lead analyst and blogger at InfoWorld, has posted a positive screencast of the Sun Grid and the Compute Server Project via The Screening Room. 

The screencast consists of two parts.  Part one is a walkthrough of the Sun Grid portal focusing on where users can buy CPU hours, upload jobs, and run them on Sun’s grid for a dollar per CPU hour.  As Jon states in his written coverage of the screencast, “When you see how quickly a distributed job can burn through CPU hours, you start to get a feeling for how this might make business sense.”

The second part of the screencast focuses on the Compute Server Project.  Jon notes that although any Solaris program can run on the grid, the Compute Server Project provides Java classes and NetBeans plug-ins that simplify the process of writing and running distributed Java programs.  Jon asks the Sun Grid team a variety of questions throughout the screencast ranging from the Grid billing process to technical questions on NetBeans, APIs and language capabilities. 

Check out the screencast from The Screening Room and the related blog entry from Jon.