New arrangement opens IBM's Lotus Symphony to wider audience

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 06 November 2008 06:49

IT Industry - Development

Using ODF 1.2 and OpenOffice 3.0 will provide subsequent versions of Symphony with seamless interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007 file formats as well as support for Visual Basic macros among the 60-plus new features planned for 2009.

So why choose Symphony over OpenOffice? Good question. Some people feel the  user interface is superior, and IBM has added support for plug-ins to extend the capabilities of the suite.

Examples of available plug-ins include the export of presentations to Flash format, connecting external databases and spreadsheets, and sending the current document as an email attachment.

Furthermore, the fact that Symphony is based on the Eclipse framework means Symphony tools are accessible from other Lotus products.

"Support for Mac and Ubuntu are good examples of IBM's long-term commitment to critical standards like the Open Document format," said Karasick. "As we rebase Symphony on OpenOffice 3.0, we are very excited about providing next-generation document creation and collaboration capabilities for the millions of potential users out there.

"IBM also sees the potential for the global developer community to use Symphony extensibility in concert with that of ODF 1.2, so that documents can be more deeply integrated into business applications and processes," he added.

Symphony has been downloaded more than three million times, IBM officials claim, and they clearly expect many millions more to come.