Symphony

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.

US based tech company IBM has announced that they would now challenge Microsoft’s MS Office productivity suite with their own free application package.

IBM plans to offer Lotus Symphony for free and it would come loaded with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software.

With this they would join Google which is offering their own online office productivity suite which currently comes with a word processor and a spreadsheet application.

IBM also recently announced that they were going to support OpenOffice.org package which is a full functional open source office productivity suite.