Phani Kumar’s Blog

Want to find good alternative to Microsoft Office? But don’t want the hassles of Open Office? Then this post is for you.

IBM’s Lotus Symphony is the latest productivity suite in the market. Symphony is open source office productivity suite currently in beta built on open office suite and eclipse platform. It is an enterprise class product and moreover it is completely free.

IBM Lotus Symphony is a set of applications comprising:

• IBM Lotus Symphony Documents, a word processor.
• IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, a spreadsheet program
• IBM Lotus Symphony Presentations, a presentation program

Symphony is built on code from OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, which was released in December 2004.Symphony supports the Open Document format (ODF), as well as Microsoft Office and Lotus SmartSuite formats, but not Microsoft’s Office Open XML format, which is used by Microsoft Office 2007. It can also export to PDF files.Symphony is available for Linux and Windows, with Mac OS X support coming later. It is based on Eclipse Rich Client Platform from IBM Lotus Expeditor for its shell and OpenOffice.org for the core office suite code.