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IBM Goes After Office With Free Desktop Suite
The no-cost alternatives for Microsoft Office just keep growing: IBM announced yesterday that it is now offering Lotus Symphony, a free suite of "enterprise-grade" software featuring word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications for Windows and Linux.
The suite is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) and is compatible with both Microsoft applications plus other suites based on ODF, like OpenOffice. Resulting documents can also be output into PDFs.
"IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux,"Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group, said in a released statement. "With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways."
IBM formally announced its membership in OpenOffice.org last week and marked the occasion by donating Lotus Notes code as well as pledging to help add functionality to the open source suite.
Lotus Symphony is available for download here.
About the Author
Becky Nagel is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Converge360 Group, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital projects at the company, including launching and running the group's popular virtual summit and Coffee talk series . She an experienced tech journalist (20 years), and before her current position, was the editorial director of the group's sites. A few years ago she gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web browser technology would impact online advertising for publishers. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.