SMBs EMBRACE PUBLISHING PACKAGES
Adobe, Corel, Microsoft offer viable options for small businesses wanting to create their own materials

By Mario Morejon

Small businesses that prefer to create their own marketing materials have many sophisticated, professional options available to them in publishing software.

CRN Test Center engineers tested three leading packages: Adobe Systems’ Creative Suite Premium, Corel’s CorelDraw 12 Beta and Microsoft’s Publisher. Engineers tested the software on an MPC ClientPro 545 Pentium 4 3.2GHZ workstation-class machine.

While Adobe offered more sophistication in its suite, the software was more difficult to learn and use.

Adobe’s Creative Suite offers the most complete solution for small businesses that design and manage their own print material and publish to their own Web sites. The new suite combines Illustrator CS, Photoshop CS, InDesign CS, GoLive CS and Acrobat 6.0 Professional.

Creative Suite now includes a comprehensive file-sharing and version-control system. Projects that are initiated under the suite’s new version-control system can be controlled from servers and desktops using a file-sharing mechanism that allows multiuser access to files. The version-control features also applies to Web files. Illustrator was the most flexible tool to work with 3-D objects. The software now has a method of extruding 3-D objects into a tool that can modify the angles of view and change the objects’ rendered surface by using simple flat graphics.

Microsoft offered more ready-made templates but lacked many features to create more impressive-looking documents.

Still, Microsoft Publisher 2003 will not disappoint newcomers to print publishing. Publisher has more wizards and templates than Illustrator and CorelDraw combined. Out of the box, users can easily choose from more than 25 types of print templates. Publisher’s drawing tool is similar to Word’s tool, so it is more limited than CorelDraw or Illustrator.

Publisher is also the easiest tool with which to create simple Web sites. Users can choose from dozens of pages to develop a Web site. Unfortunately, Publisher does not offer a direct way to combine print and Web documents so users have to bounce between templates to create a unified view between print and Web content.

Corel had the most user-friendly printing features and user interface of the three products examined. From the main workspace, CorelDraw provides highly customizable printing formats, multipage tabs, easy document navigation and many tools readily available on the left-side toolbar.

Also, CorelDraw now has an Export for Office engine that automatically exports objects to Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. The engine also can transfer all the transparencies in an object as well. CorelDraw has added new formats to its built-in PDF publisher. The tool can now export files to PDF/X-1a, PDF/x-3 and PDF for document distribution.

CorelDraw is a good compromise between Microsoft Publisher and Adobe’s Creative Suite. The product has many intuitive features that small businesses and solution providers can learn right away.

After examining the three software suites, CorelDraw proved to be the best product overall for businesses of 10 or fewer employees, with Publisher coming in a close second.