IBM has decided to revive the Lotus Symphony office suit. IBM just recently decided to dedicate 35 programmers for the OpenOffice.org office suit, but will apparently also bring back the Lotus Symphony. Lotus Symphony was first launched back in 1985 and was the successor to Lotus 1-2-3. Today the Symphony suit when returns it consists out of three applications; Documents, Presentation and Spreadsheets. The names are pretty much self-explanatory. This first version is the beta 1 and of course free of charge.
Lotus Symphony is available for both Windows and Linux, with an OS X version is in the works. Lotus Symphony is based on the ODF format (Open Document Format), but can handle most of the known formats today (including the Microsoft standards), and even output to PDF.
“Increasingly, users of productivity software are challenging the confines of the desktop. IBM Lotus Symphony provides a fresh, people-oriented way to create, contribute and reuse content instantly across a wide range of applications. In addition, because it is based on ODF, Lotus Symphony allows organizations to access, use and maintain all their documents for the long-term, without worrying about ongoing software licensing and royalty fees.”
This is certainly two, or perhaps even three, slaps in the face of Microsoft and its Office suit. It would be three because IBM really shows that it taken a stance against Microsoft’s suggested standard OOXML (Office Open XML), while at the same time supporting the biggest competition Microsoft has, OpenOffice.org, and releasing another product to compete with MS Office.
You can visit the official Symphony Lotus website for more information or you can go straight ahead and download the application from HERE.
