IBM Lotus Symphony, A Free, Open-Source Office Application Suite
Having only recently joined the OpenOffice.org developer community, IBM has launched its own free office application suite, IBM Lotus Symphony, which, like OpenOffice, includes word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications. Obviously, they've levereged some of the technology from the open-source OpenOffice application suite as well as their own Lotus Notes to get this out so soon.
So, yet another salvo is fired at Microsoft's domination of the office application market, which is good for anyone or any organisation or company a bit strapped for cash. As for IBM's involvement in OpenOffice development, they will be making initial code contributions that they've been developing as part of Lotus Notes, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice. Sounds like both sides will benefit from this in the future. They are also strongly promoting ODF as the document sharing format to use so that's another shot at Microsoft, who are trying to push their own proprietary Open XML format.
IBM Lotus Symphony can convert documents, spreadsheets, and presentations types into PDF files and can read and convert Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Unfortunately, it only supports Linux and Windows so there's no Macintosh version. Also, it's a bit of a memory hog and requires at least 1Gb of RAM but bear in mind that this is a beta release so it may well improve.
Related Posts: Microsoft-Free Word Processing
So, yet another salvo is fired at Microsoft's domination of the office application market, which is good for anyone or any organisation or company a bit strapped for cash. As for IBM's involvement in OpenOffice development, they will be making initial code contributions that they've been developing as part of Lotus Notes, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice. Sounds like both sides will benefit from this in the future. They are also strongly promoting ODF as the document sharing format to use so that's another shot at Microsoft, who are trying to push their own proprietary Open XML format.
IBM Lotus Symphony can convert documents, spreadsheets, and presentations types into PDF files and can read and convert Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Unfortunately, it only supports Linux and Windows so there's no Macintosh version. Also, it's a bit of a memory hog and requires at least 1Gb of RAM but bear in mind that this is a beta release so it may well improve.
Related Posts: Microsoft-Free Word Processing
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