SoftMaker

SoftMaker Software GmbH is a software company that produces office software and is located in Nuremberg, Germany. SoftMaker was founded in 1989 by Martin Kotulla^[1]. 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^[1], 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 FreeFont web site.

SoftMaker Office is SoftMaker's flagship product, an office suite marketed to home, small business and educational users^[1]. The current version, called SoftMaker Office 2008 consists of the word processor TextMaker (compatible with MS Word), the spreadsheet PlanMaker (compatible with MS Excel) the presentation software application Presentations (compatible with MS PowerPoint) and the scripting language BasicMaker (compatible with MS VBA).

SoftMaker Office 2008 is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Pocket PCs (Windows Mobile handheld devices), and Windows CE. The 2006 version was also available for FreeBSD and Handheld PCs.

A database application DataMaker is also due to be released in 2009.

Currently, SoftMaker Office supports all popular Microsoft Office and many OpenOffice.org file formats, as well as its own proprietary formats. SoftMaker claims to be working on ODF compliant file formats^[1], 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 not free like competitors KOffice or OpenOffice.org, its greatest marketing strength is its high degree of Microsoft Office compatibility^[2][3][4][5]. 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^[6]. Significantly, this level of compatibility extends to non-Windows platforms^[5]. 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 OpenOffice^[3].

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

• SoftMaker's home page in English
• SoftMaker academic pricing

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} *Review and interview focusing on the company, compatibility, and ODF compliance
2. ^ Software in Review SoftMaker Office 2006 review
3. ^ ^{a b} ITWEEK SoftMaker Office 2006 review
4. ^ Review of Softmaker Office 2006 for pocket PC
5. ^ ^{a b} Review of TextMaker under Linux
6. ^ *PlanMaker web page showing comparison of graphs done by Excel, Planmaker, and OpenOffice