IBM Releases Office Desktop Software

IBM announced IBM Lotus Symphony, a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Business, academic, governmental and consumer users alike can download this enterprise-grade office software, which is the same tool inside some of IBM’s most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8. In addition, these tools can be used to seamlessly extend a business process or custom application to create dynamic composite applications.

There are three core applications that make up the Lotus Symphony tools: Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. These intuitive software tools, which support Windows and Linux desktops, are designed to handle the majority of office productivity tasks that workers typically perform. Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and Open Document Format (ODF), and also can output content in PDF format.

"IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux," said Chetan Yardi, Country Manager, Lotus, IBM India/South Asia. "The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. 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."