Filed under: Windows, Linux, Office, IBM, Freeware
IBM updates free office suite, launches Lotus Symphony 1
by Brad Linder Jun 15th 2008 at 4:00PM
Unlike OpenOffice.org, Lotus Symphony is not open source software. While IBM is providing it for free, Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, which is the last version of OpenOffice.org that had a license allowing developers to modify the code and keep the changes private.
According to Linux.com, IBM hopes to target the enterprise market with this software. The goal is to provide Lotus Symphony as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, while charging $25,000 per year for support. Of course, if you know how to use word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation applications, you probably won't need to spend the money. But you also might not find much in Lotus Symphony that isn't already available in its open source cousin, OpenOffice.org.
So what's new in Lotus Symphony 1? Here are a few highlights:
- Critical crash and freezing issues have been fixed
- Improved performance when creating new documents, spell checking presentations of spreadsheets, redrawing a presentation page, saving PPT files, and performing other actions
- Improved interoperability with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and SmartSuite documents
- Added support for 4 more languages, bringing the total to 28
thanks Hessel Olijve!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Zeke said 11:03PM on 6-15-2008
Downloaded it to a pretty new box with 2.5GB of RAM... I usually try not to be pessimistic about 1.0 software, but this app is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW! Very reminiscent of OpenOffice 1, but even slower. OpenOffice has enough trouble breaking off a piece of Microsoft's pie, this will just make things even more confusing unless somebody at IBM really steps it up.
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ZeRo said 10:48AM on 6-16-2008
I personally don't think its confusing, but it does look promising and lotus does tend to have a lot of nice features... just wished it wasn't so bloody buggy.