Recently a flaw in two of Microsoft Office’s applications was revealed by a researcher Hongjun Wu from the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore. Microsoft’s response to the issue has been rather inadequate; the so called 'RC4 flaw' could allow data to be recovered from files that have version history.

Should users continue to pay for a product that isn’t being supported in the way that best suits their privacy and security needs?

What other options do users have for Office application suites?

Two other popular Office suites that run on the Microsoft Windows platform are:

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is a completely free Office suite that is under the LGPL and SISSL licenses.With multiple platform support including Microsoft Windows and several flavors of Linux, OpenOffice.org is a practical choice. OpenOffice.org has origins in the StarOffice project and now boasts close to 100% file format compatibility with competing Office suites, making the change over that much simpler.

For more information: http://www.openoffice.org

StarOffice

StarOffice is Sun’s Office suite offering for several desktop platforms including Microsoft Windows, Solaris Operating Environment and Linux. The pricing for StarOffice seems more reasonable than Microsoft’s. This is an obvious option for those working on a Sun based platform.

For more information: http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index.xml