IBM scores &#39;Symphony&#39; as free online Office rival
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InfoWorld - IBM has spun out productivity software included in the latest version of Lotus Notes as a free online service to compete with Microsoft&#39;s Office productivity suite.
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Lotus Symphony targets Microsoft Office with a free bundle of applications.
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IBM on Monday will unveil free developer resources for Cloudscape, a small-footprint, Java-based database that the company recently contributed to the Apache Software Foundation as an open source project.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- IBM on Tuesday released a series of new products and services in its Workplace productivity software lineup. IBM Workplace blends collaborative tools from Lotus Notes/Domino with WebSphere Portal and Everyplace technologies.
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ThinkFree's got happy users, a familiar interface, hooks into the blazing Web 2.0 space, and a price point far below its main competitor. But if your main competitor is Microsoft Office, all those advantages count for less market share than you'd think.
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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- PeopleSoft&#39;s arsenal of takeover defenses isn&#39;t expected to include a big rival to Oracle. Free!
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is to offer the world a free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program in yet another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite. The move sounds ambitious, but Microsoft is unlikely to be trembling in fear just yet --Â Lotus Symphony,Â as it will be known, is really just a re-packaging of the OpenOffice suite that has taken only fringe market share from Microsoft, since being taken under the wing of Sun seven years ago. IBM says it will contribute 35 programmers to the Symphony-cum-OpenOffice development effort, in a bid to spark new interest in a software suite that can trace its ancestry back to a suite called StarOffice, once owned by obscure German company, Star. IBM hopes its much larger corporate presence will generate more success this time. "IBM is very pleased to beÂ joining the OpenOffice.org community.Â We are very optimistic that IBM's contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide tangible benefits to the community membership and to users of OpenOffice.org technology around the world," said Mike Rhodin, of IBM's Lotus Division. "We welcome IBM's contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product. But equally important is IBM's future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO ODF standard," said John McCreesh of OpenOffice. IBM has been here before. In 1995, it paid $3.5 billion for Lotus Development, complete with its suite of high-regarded office applications, only for those programs to fall of the map completely as it focused on selling the OS/2 groupware, Lotus Notes, in a nice twist itself once a creation of current Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. OpenOfficeÂ has launched version 2.3 just of its suite bang on cue for IBM's endorsement. TechworldÂ is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM has spun out productivity software included in the latest version of Lotus Notes as a free online service to compete with Microsoft's Office productivity suite. The name for the suite, Symphony, is the same name IBM used for its first integrated productivity suite, which it offered in the 1980s but which never took off with customers. Mike Rhodin, general manager of Lotus Software for the IBM Software Group, said the company brought back the name to "herald in a new age" of productivity software. Symphony includes Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, and Lotus Symphony Presentations. The applications are available online at a new Web site that will also serve as the home page for a community IBM hopes will grow around the suite. Rhodin said IBM is offering Symphony in beta form because it wants the community to suggest improvements for the software so the suite can evolve more quickly than it could if the company were to work on it independently. Like the productivity software built into Notes 8, Symphony is based on the open-source Eclipse platform and uses ODF (Open Document Format for XML) as its native file format. ODF is a document standard recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)Â and a rival to Microsoft's OOXML (Open XML), which is the native format in Office.Â Microsoft's quest to have OOXML become a standard alongside ODF was dealt a significant blow when the ISO voted against fast-tracking approval of the formatÂ earlier this month. IBM has been an ardent supporter of ODF for some time, but with Symphony, the company is bringing this support into the Web 2.0 age. Symphony is an alternative not only to Office but to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the search giant's own version of online document-editing and creation software. IBM also is offering fee-based telephone support for services if customers want that option. In addition to Symphony, IBM also unveiled Lotus Notes as a hosted service on Tuesday. Rhodin said the service is meant for the SMB marketÂ and organizations up to about 10,000 users. According to IBM, the operational cost of hosted Lotus is about $5 to $10 per user per month. In addition to Lotus Notes, customers can choose to include hosted versions of Lotus Sametime and Lotus Quickr as optional services, Rhodin said.
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Early user reviews of IBM's new Lotus Symphony office software suite are unlikely to be music to IBM's ears.
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IBM on Monday said it would start  offering free word processing and other office software,  joining a growing group of companies with free applications  challenging a core Microsoft Corp product.
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Targets rival Microsoft IBM has joined the growing group of tech companies punting alternatives to Microsoft's omnipresent Office suite.â¦
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SUBANG JAYA: IBM (www.ibm.com) has released the beta version of its latest enterprise-grade integration software to Malaysian customers.
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The notion that cheap or free Web-based word processing or spreadsheet programs could replace traditional software like Microsoft Office (MSFT) is becoming more realistic all the time. Outfits like Google (GOOG), ThinkFree, and Zoho have new and better services every day.
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(InfoWorld) - ThinkFree added offline support to its online application suite Tuesday and launched it as a $7-a-month alternative to Microsoft Office. Touting ThinkFree Premium: Beta Edition as "the most Microsoft-compatible online/offline hybrid office suite," the Boston-based company said offline access to documents gives users the best of both worlds. "The ability to access productivity tools from anywhere is key to being efficient and effective," said TJ Kang, ThinkFree's CEO, in a statement. "But it also needs to include the ability to travel with your laptop to unconnected environments. Premium Edition offers the best of both, the collaboration and anywhere access of the Internet with the speed, reliability, and security of a desktop application." ThinkFree started life as a desktop-only suite of pared-down applications --Â  the desktop edition remains available -- and then moved to an online model as a free suite of word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation maker. Premium adds the ability to save documents either locally or online, as well as a synchronization tool that automatically updates the files stored on ThinkFree's servers when the user reconnects to the Internet. Also new to Premium are a background save feature, a full-screen nonbrowser editor, the elimination of file size limitations, and drag-and-drop file management. ThinkFree Premium runs on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers, and requires Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Until August, the beta is free to use; starting that month, ThinkFree Premium will cost $7 per month per user, with a 10 percent discount for yearly subscriptions.
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Desktop suite Lotus Symphony runs on Windows and Linux and supports OpenDocument, PDF and Microsoft Office document formats.
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TechWeb - ThinkFree, which is reportedly an acquisition target for Google, is banking that Microsoft Office users will be dissatisfied with the new version, and will turn to ThinkFree's online clone of previous Office versions instead.
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Just a week after IBM joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community, the company released its own version of the group's free desktop applications suite -- calling it Lotus Symphony.