Sun Microsystems Middle East Africa, has launched StarOffice 5.2, Sun's powerful, full-featured, multi-platform office productivity suite.

"With the latest version of the StarOffice application suite, Sun continues to change the way people buy, use, deploy and develop personal productivity applications. This open, extensible software features enhanced application performance and reliability, delivering a complete set of rich, easy-to-use office productivity tools in a unified desktop environment," says Alan Townsend, director, Sun Microsystems Middle East Africa.

"StarOffice software changes the rules in other ways, too. Completely cross platform, it runs on just about everything in your enterprise: PCs and UNIX workstations, servers, or internal LAN. That means customers are free to choose any platform that works for them, rather than the one the software runs on. StarOffice software supports everything from the Solaris Operating Environment and Linux to Windows 2000, NT, 98, and 95 platforms.

Sun also recently announced the release of StarOffice source code to the open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL.)

"Open access to the StarOffice source code will give vendors, developers and the end-user community the freedom to choose, the power to innovate and enhanced compatibility across file formats and platforms," says Townsend.