Evermore Software, based in Wuxi City, plans to challenge Microsoft's Office dominance with the release of its Evermore Integrated Office 2004 next month at the Demo conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, next month.

Evermore Integrated Office (EIOffice) combines the traditional elements of productivity suites into one application. Users simply launch EIOffice, rather than a word processor, a spreadsheet application, and a presentation tool. Documents are stored in a single file format and the application, written in Java, runs on any operating systems that supports Java, including Windows and Linux, according to Evermore.

There are concerns, however that, despite the attractiveness of EIOffice, the costs are too high, and Evermore itself lacks the marketing strength to make a stand amongst the host of Office rivals including Sun Microsystems's StarOffice, Corel's WordPerfect Office and the free, open-source OpenOffice.