Wednesday, 19 September 2007

IBMs Symphony Not Music To Microsoft’s Ears

In a bid to rival its one time friend Microsoft, IBM has started offering Symphony documents, Spreadsheet, and Presentations for free...

In a bid to rival its one time friend Microsoft, IBM has started offering Symphony documents, Spreadsheet, and Presentations for free. With this free launch, IBM hopes to build a community around the Microsoft Office alternative.

In fact IBM, based in Armonk, New York, has spun out the productivity software in the latest version of its Lotus Notes to make the office productivity tools free.

Symphony includes Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, and Lotus Symphony Presentations. IBM official Mike Rhodin said IBM is offering Symphony in beta form because it wants the community to make changes to the software so that the suite can evolve more quickly than it could if the company were to work on it independently.

Like the productivity software built into Notes 8, Symphony is based on the open source Eclipse platform and uses ODF (Open Document Format) as its native file format.