The StarOffice help file claims that you can use it to invite other participants to meetings by sending the calendar entry to their copies of StarOffice, but the help files do not describe even the first step in getting this to work. Speaking of teamwork, StarOffice has finally gained some of the features seen in Lotus SmartSuite for allowing group collaboration on documents. It's possible to view changes made by other team members and accept or reject them if you have the authority to do so. In the drawing tools there has been some talk of new 3D features of some limited appeal. What tickled our fancy the most was a new way to vectorize a bitmap.
Vector images are easier to scale to different sizes without losing detail.
Being able to convert a bitmap into a vector drawing can be a huge advantage if you want to work with the shapes in a picture, but can't isolate them with a paint program. Now we have to convince Star Division to take the Java 1.1.7 runtime and developers kit out of StarOffice. 5.0 was seventy megabytes to download, but 5.1 is ninety . This will put it out of reach for a serious number of people with low-end internet connections, perhaps to the joy of a company that really would like to sell you a CD instead. The other serious problem is the upgrade path for users of earlier versions.