SoftMaker

[http://www.softmaker.com/english/ SoftMaker Software GmbH] is a software company in Nuremberg, Germany. SoftMaker was founded in 1989 by Martin Kotulla* [http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=2006070509040463 Review and interview focusing on the company, compatibility, and ODF compliance] ] which produces office software. In the last few years it has also started offering digital fonts. Best known in Germany and the EU, SoftMaker is slowly pursuing the North American market, where it faces stiff competition from both free and commercial competitors, as a long-term goal.

Students, teachers, schools, and universities can purchase SoftMaker Office extremely cheaply (a nominal charge of EUR 20 or US$ 25 buys an entire site licence for one product, for example) through the "Schulen ans Netz" (get schools onto the net) initiative, part of SoftMaker's academic sales program.

To promote its digital font sales, SoftMaker publishes one font each month free for download from its [http://www.freefont.de/ FreeFont] web site.

SoftMaker Office is SoftMaker's flagship product, an office suite marketed to home, small business and educational users. SoftMaker Office consists of the word processor TextMaker (MS Word clone), and the spreadsheet PlanMaker (MS Excel clone). SoftMaker Office 2006 is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and various handheld device platforms. In December, 2007, SoftMaker released SoftMaker Office 2008 for Windows, which adds presentation software application Presentations (MS PowerPoint clone) and event-driven programming language BasicMaker (MS VBA clone). SoftMaker Office 2008 for Pocket PCs and for Windows CE have started shipping in the summer of 2008. SoftMaker Office 2008 for Linux is currently in public beta testing. A database application DataMaker is also due to be released in 2008.

Currently, SoftMaker Office supports all popular Microsoft Office and many Open Office file formats, as well as its own proprietary formats. SoftMaker claims to be working on ODF compliant file formats, but currently supports OpenDocument only in the word processor.

Competitive Strategy

The SoftMaker Office sales strategy is based on cross-platform usability along with reasonable pricing and free post-sale customer service. However, since SoftMaker Office is still not free like competitors KOffice or Open Office, its greatest marketing strength is its high degree of Microsoft Office compatibility [ [http://www.softwareinreview.com/office_suites/softmaker_office_2006_review.html Software in Review SoftMaker Office 2006 review] ] [http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/software/2169047/review-softmaker-office-2006 ITWEEK SoftMaker Office 2006 review] ] [ [http://www.mobilitysite.com/articles/link.php?id=391 Review of Softmaker Office 2006 for pocket PC] ] [http://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/WordProcs/#textmaker Review of TextMaker under Linux] ] . As a major sales point, SoftMaker cites its ability to render graphs and charts within PlanMaker which are often indistinguishable with those from Microsoft's Excel [* [http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofwcomp_en.htm PlanMaker web page showing compatison of graphs done by Excel, Planmaker, and Open Office] ] . Significantly, this level of compatibility extends to non-Windows platforms. Even on Windows platforms, SoftMaker Office competes with native Windows office suites based on its MS Office compatibility.

SoftMaker also claims its Office suite is faster, with smaller memory and hard drive footprints than MS Office or Open Office.

The most significant areas of incompatibility, like with all non-Microsoft office suites, are in documents which use VBA scripts. While BasicMaker is a step forward, it still doesn't offer seamless VBA compatibility. There are also some minor incompatibilities with page layout formatting where page boundaries may not match without adjusting the margin settings. Most of these problems have been solved in SoftMaker Office 2008.

External links

* [http://www.softmaker.com/english/ SoftMaker's home page in English]
* [http://www.softmaker.com/english/education/index_en.htm SoftMaker academic pricing]

References