[LINK] IBM hopes open office is Symphony to your key-tapping fingers

[Bernard]

IBM hopes open office is Symphony to your key-tapping fingers
Targets rival Microsoft
By Kelly Fiveash
The Register
Wednesday 19th September 2007 16:20 GMT
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/19/ibm_office_symphony_open_source/

IBM has joined the growing group of tech companies punting alternatives 
to Microsoft's omnipresent Office suite.

Its new Lotus Symphony package, which launched yesterday, includes word 
processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs and is available free 
of charge to Windows and Linux users.

The software uses the internationally recognised Open Document Format 
(ODF) allowing documents to be read by multiple software apps, unlike 
the standard adopted by Microsoft whose range of office products 
restrict different file types to one system.

Just last week IBM joined the OpenOffice.org development community, 
kicking off its participation by donating code it has developed for its 
Lotus Notes project.

With the launch of Symphony, IBM has marked out clear intentions to grab 
a chunk of the market currently dominated by Microsoft.

IBM software's senior vice president Steve Mills said:

"The lifeblood of any organisation 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."

However, the firm is yet to bring an Apple Macintosh version of Symphony 
to the marketplace

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Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au