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. She has a background in Web technology and B2B enterprise technology journalism.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.