Lotus Symphony Officce Suite From IBM

The world of word processing and Office suites is really becoming crowded nowadays. Now IBM has released their own suite of free Office utilities named Lotus Symphony.

The good news about this particular suite of programs is that IBM will be quickly adding support for Windows XP, Windows Vista, SUSE Linux and Red Hat Linux and Mac OS X. Yup that's right folks, Mac. No word on how soon the Mac version will come but hey, they have dedicated themselves to serving the Mac community. Did you get that developers!? This is why IBM has a fat bank account, they know that people use platforms other than Windows.

I must say, I use Microsoft Office and really don't have a problem with, in fact I like it. But it looks like that monopoly Microsoft had on word processing is coming to an end,

---One fact is plain as day here: IBM has Microsoft Office squarely in its sights. As a suite, Symphony is in the same class as Microsoft Office and it offers much of the functionality required by the rank-and-file in large organizations. One look at the FAQ shows that IBM is positioning Symphony as an "alternative to purchasing, deploying, and managing typical vendor-proprietary productivity suites." Is it an exact replacement for MS Office? No. Symphony can open and read .doc, .xls and .ppt files (and PDFs) but as outlined in the FAQ, there are still some compatibility issues with OOXML files requiring minor tweaks. But for employees who just write documents, compute data tables and build slideshows, it's enough. And it's free -- Microsoft Office costs around $120.
Also notable is the fact that Symphony's native file format is ODF, the open-source international standard that Microsoft is openly challenging with its own proposed standard, OOXML. Last week, IBM joined forces with OpenOffice.org, cementing its position as one of the most vocal "big money" evangelists of open-source office software and open standards for documents. Last week, Google expressed its pleasure in seeing OOXML hit the skids in the international standardization process.---Wired

Comments

[Fred A. Maymir-Ducharme]

Any thoughts of supporting Symphony on Blackberry and other PDAs ?

[Mpaper]

Fred, I haven't heard anything about mobile support, maybe you know something that I don't? But if that were the case, I think it would be fantastic. As long as docs can be opened "across platform".

Google docs will undoubtedly be included in their new mobile OS, so i don't see why IBM couldn't release a mobile version to compete. But in the meantime, if you're a Blackberry user, be on the lookout for docsToGo for Blackberry from Datavz. I use it on my Treo's and it's great.