IBM Goes After Office With Free Desktop Suite -- Visual Studio Magazine

IBM Goes After Office With Free Desktop Suite

By Becky Nagel
09/19/2007

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 both Microsoft applications plus other suites based on ODF, like 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,"Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group, said 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.

About the Author

Becky Nagel serves as vice president of AI for 1105 Media specializing in developing media, events and training for companies around AI and generative AI technology. She also regularly writes and reports on AI news, and is the founding editor of PureAI.com. She's the author of "ChatGPT Prompt 101 Guide for Business Users" and other popular AI resources with a real-world business perspective. She regularly speaks, writes and develops content around AI, generative AI and other business tech. Find her on X/Twitter @beckynagel.

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