Free download here .
Posted on 09/21/2007 6:54:03 AM PDT by NYer
The week's not off to a great start for Microsoft. On Monday, a European court upheld almost $1 billion in antitrust penalties against the software maker. A day later, it's IBM that is taking aim at Microsoft with the release of a free office software suite called Lotus Symphony.
IBM said Tuesday that Symphony, based on open source software from the OpenOffice.org project, will be made available as a free download essentially to whoever wants it. The package contains a word processor called Lotus Symphony Documents, as well as Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. IBM is calling the suite "enterprise-grade productivity software" and points out that it's based on many of the same tools found in its pricey Lotus Notes 8 e-mail and collaboration platform.
Because it's free, Lotus Symphony could present a significant challenge to Microsoft's new Office 2007 suite in the market for office productivity software. Some commercial software buyers have expressed concerns about Office 2007's price and compatibility with older applications. The software is based on a new format developed by Microsoft called Office Open XML. Earlier this month, the format failed to gain fast track approval from the International Organization for Standardization.
As an Open Office derivative, Lotus Symphony employs the Open Document Format to ensure cross-application portability of data. ODF is an approved ISO format, a fact that appeals to many enterprise software buyers -- particularly those in the government market. "With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information," said IBM software chief Steve Mills, in a statement.
Earlier this month, IBM said it would donate portions of the Lotus Notes code to OpenOffice.org, which governs the Open Office project.
To date, Open Office has failed to put much of a dint in Microsoft's multi-billion dollar office software business. However, that could start to change in light of Monday's announcement. IBM said it has tasked 35 programmers with creating enhancements for Symphony. Because it's an open source project, those enhancements will be made available to other vendors that offer versions of Open Office, including Sun Microsystems.
IBM's Symphony announcement takes a page from the company's Linux playbook. Big Blue is a significant backer of the open source operating system, though it derives no direct revenue from the software. Rather, IBM has created an ecosystem of customers and partners that buy IBM's commercial middleware products to tie together systems built on Linux. The strategy not only boosts demand for IBM middleware, it also denies to Microsoft some valuable market share. IBM now appears to be adopting a similar strategy in the desktop market.
OpenOffice isn't the only challenge to Microsoft's dominance in the productivity software market. Google recently entered the fray with an array of hosted applications sold as a service under the Google Apps brand. Earlier this month, outsourcer Capgemini said it would add support for Google Apps Premier to its service offerings.
Free download here .
Hmmmm. I may have to check this out. I wonder if the current version has any significant advantages over Open Office 2.2, which is what I’m running now?
}:-)4
I’m not sure why this is needed. Open Office is free and works pretty well, in MS Office format as well as its own.
I was so-so with RedHat.
Ubuntu sucked rocks.
I very much like, I mean alot, the latest Knoppix distro. Now I just gotta figure out a way to get it bootable on disk instead of the CD! Who’da thunk it!
check later
ping
I have Office 2007 Pro but haven't opened it. I understand that MS has changed the file system in Office 2007. That may make it difficult to interchange files with Open Office but that will probably be worked out.
:D
As soon as I saw “free software” in the headline I was in. Thanks for the link.
download
Ugh, if they’ve contaminated this thing with Notes cooties, no thanks. :) I am stuck using Notes on our client site and everybody HATES it. The client is switching to Outlook and Exchange fairly soon, so while they’ll be wide open to spam and viruses, at least the user interface’ll be better, right? :)
}:-)4
I used a product called Lotus Symphony for DOS years and years ago. They must be re-using the copyrighted name
I found Open Office to be slow: what do you guys think?
MS Office 2007 has a new file format, incompatible with even previous Office programs (but you can choose to work in the ‘old’ format) And they removed the menus in favor of a Ribbon, which my fingers and I find quite distressing.
Not really. I can save it in Word’s .doc format or in any number of other formats like RTF. I’ve moved documents in and out of OpenOffice in .doc format and never had much of a problem with it—although I’ve never tried anything really complex.
}:-)4
Thanks fer the link
I downloaded and installed yesterday. I will let you all know what I think - but it is promising.
I used Knoppix for a while a few years ago, and installed it that way.
I use Kubuntu now. I think Knoppix uses KDE, same as Kubuntu -- a bit different from Ubuntu.
I use the openoffice that came with SUSE and it works for me editing docs I need to.
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