Symphony of Office Destruction
IBM/Lotus has fired a shot across the bow of MS at their flagship Office.
I give you Lotus Symphony!
Totally free and easy to download @ 136MB for the file.
Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse framework and is meant not only to give consumers and businesses an alternative to Microsoft Office, but also to promote the use of ODF (Open Document for XML), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). “The end goal here is the proliferation of the open standard,” Rhodin said.
Microsoft Office 2007, which has more than 90 percent market share, does not natively support ODF and instead uses the company’s OOXML (Open XML) format, which failed to pass a recent ISO vote for standardization.
And for the record, IBM/Lotus has had 100,000 downloads of the product in its first week of availability.
I have downloaded it and gave it a mild test run this morning. It is quicker to open than other distros of Open Office and a lot easier on the eyes for sure. I’ll be playing with it as much as I can over the next few weeks to see if it is a viable alternative to Orifice.
PS: This product is still in Beta but no bugs or crashes found on my system thusfar.
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September 27, 2007 - 3:55 pm
Great info sloth! I am going to give it a go – does it have PDF support built in by any chance?
Did you see the poll? Its just for you :)
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September 27, 2007 - 4:07 pm
I have been using this for a week now. We are testing it out for a possible roll out when it is out of beta. So far so good. Have you seen any issues?
@Karl – as for PDF’s the answer is yes
“Symphony can read files from Microsoft Office and make PDF files, too. By default, Symphony saves your work in the Open Document Format. “
Hope I dont sound like a salesperson
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September 27, 2007 - 4:29 pm
Karl, I already answered the poll…and guess what I chose! ;-)
And Ninja is right, it makes PDFs out the box so to speak, but what I like is that it is following IBM/Lotus tradition of openness and saves it as a ODF by DEFAULT!
Keep us informed, Ninja, how it goes for you.
I think the biggest thing here is that it is Open Office, which people know of but are skeptical, but when you throw the significant weight of IBM behind it as something they are giving away for free to push the ODF and only trying to get support for it, it speaks volumes.
As our marketing consultant says to me, and he is a former Big Blue’r, if you want to see what the right trends are in IT, just follow what IBM is doing.
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September 27, 2007 - 5:52 pm
Everything old is new again. Lotus Symphony was the first “office automation” suite I ever used, back on an IBM PS/2, back in the 1980s. Funny.
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September 27, 2007 - 11:55 am
Great info sloth! I am going to give it a go – does it have PDF support built in by any chance?
Did you see the poll? Its just for you :)
Click to Reply to This Comment.
September 27, 2007 - 1:52 pm
Everything old is new again. Lotus Symphony was the first “office automation” suite I ever used, back on an IBM PS/2, back in the 1980s. Funny.
Click to Reply to This Comment.