News
IBM Goes After Office With Free Desktop Suite
- By Becky Nagel
- September 19, 2007
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 Microsoft applications plus other suites based on ODF, such as 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," stated Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group, 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.