Corel Targets Students with Low Cost WordPerfect

Corel has taken WordPerfect back to school. WordPerfect Office 12 Student and Teacher Edition offers the full WordPerfect package to educational and non-profit organizations at a low cost. Keeping in mind the impact technology fees have on institutions with finite resources, Corel has relaxed product licensing requirements.

Launched in April, WordPerfect 12 is not glaringly dissimilar from Microsoft Office. The suite includes all of the components enshrined in customers' expectations of productivity suites: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and contact management.

To add a touch of familiarity to the unknown, Corel's new Workspace Manager enables users who are not accustomed to WordPerfect to adjust the user interface to create custom designs, or even clone the layout of the Microsoft toolbar and menu items.

Corel has included Microsoft Office file support and compatibility toolbars that are intended to reduce the complexity of working with documents authored in the rival suite. However, Corel has not constrained itself to Microsoft Office; WordPerfect users can publish documents in PDF, XML, Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file formats.

Priced at $99 USD, WordPerfect Office 12 Student and Teacher Edition undercuts Microsoft by $50 USD. Furthermore, Corel offers a clear upgrade path for students after graduation and its software can be installed on up to three separate machines.

"The product clearly is Corel's response to Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition," wrote Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox in his Microsoft Monitor Web log. "Microsoft launched the XP version in October 2001 for about $250 less than the same non-scholastic version. I view the Office version as a way of Microsoft reducing the product's cost to consumers without jeopardizing the higher businesses pricing."

Corel is not only competing against Microsoft, but with other vendors who are vying for the ten percent market share that does not belong to Redmond. Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems won a 2.5 million seat contract with the Ontario Ministry of Education for StarOffice 7 to service the Province's students.

Corel WordPerfect Office 12 Student and Teacher Edition is available now.