Just a week after finally joining the OpenOffice group, as reported in last week’s iNEWSWire UK, IBM yesterday launched Lotus Symphony, its own suite of free desktop applications.

Big Blue’s name for its new OpenOffice-based apps should provoke a wry smile on the faces of long-time IBM watchers. Symphony was also a name that Lotus Corp used for its office suite of apps in the years before it was purchased by IBM in 1995.

The software consists of Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and the all-important OpenDocument 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 Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. "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."

IBM claims that Symphony may be able to help businesses complete tasks more rapidly and efficiently by connecting to relevant information from a variety of sources. It says that companies can integrate Symphony tools into their custom applications and connect to myriad data sources to create composite applications.

It cites a scenario where ERP systems can be linked directly into a user's workspace. The user can submit queries to the ERP system which will respond with the requested data. This is delivered to a user's workspace, where Lotus Symphony Documents automatically populates the fields in a customer's shipping invoice.

IT industry pundits have been keen to see the move as one in the eye for Microsoft and its own Office suite, especially at a time when it also faces direct competition from Google’s free online offerings. However, others have been less effusive, pointing out that Symphony lacks email and calendaring capabilities.

The Lotus Symphony beta software can be downloaded from http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony .

Seamus Quinn