IBM hopes open office is Symphony to your key-tapping fingers
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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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IBM said it is joining the OpenOffice.org community to collaborate on software development for the Open Document Format (ODF), an ISO standard that governs the creation, storage, and exchange of documents.
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A native version of the free OpenOffice.org productivity suite for OS X may ship next year.
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Amid intense lobbying, Microsoft is expected to squeak out a victory this week to have its open document format, Office Open XML, recognized as an international standard.
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InfoWorld - You might think the steady defeat of bills in several U.S. states to mandate the use of free interoperable file formats might dampen the spirits of IBM, one of the prime supporters of&#160;ODF (OpenDocument Format). Far from it, said IBM&#39;s Bob Sutor, who sees the recent news as par for the course in the evolution of any open standard.
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IBM has taken the lead in lobbying against the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML format. But it does support the format in a few products -- a fact that some Microsoft bloggers were happy to point out.
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IBM is turning to technology from Siemens to help bring Sametime, part of its Lotus Notes messaging and collaboration suite, up to par with Microsofts upcoming Office Communications Server 2007.
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Its Workplace package is catching on with clients, and more software makers are signing on. Still, it&#39;s no Windows smasher. IBM launched a bold foray into desktop computing last spring, when it took on Microsoft&#39;s
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Thanks to some new developments in document standards, Office 2007 users will be able to share files with open-source office apps and online productivity suites from the likes of Zoho and Google. In Monkey Bites.
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Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format.
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Enterprise software for free? Apparently so. IBM has just releated a new enterprise-grade suite of office productivity applications, called Lotus Symphony. The free software that comprises Lotus Symphony includes a word processor, spreadsheet program, and business presentation applications that are clearly targeted at the capabilities of the popular Microsoft Office suite.
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In a clever marketing move that had some of us fooled, IBM revealed today it was doing much more than beginning the process of rebuilding its own applications suite. In fact, Beta 1 of the new Lotus Symphony is already under way.
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(InfoWorld) - It may be Valentine's Day but there are no love letters being exchanged between duelling electronic document formats, ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML. Instead, Microsoft, the backer of Open XML, took a public swing at ODF supporter IBM. Microsoft posted an open letter on its Web site Wednesday titled "Interoperability, Choice, and Open XML," signed by two of its general managers -- Tom Robertson, who handles interoperability and standards, and Jean Paoli, responsible for interoperability and XML architecture. In the letter, Microsoft claimed that IBM is attempting to slow down the approval process by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to recognize Open XML as an international standard. IBM declined to comment publicly on the letter, but a spokesman said the company had previously addressed many of the issues raised by Microsoft. In May, ISO approved ODF as an international standard and is currently considering whether to award the same recognition to Open XML. ODF has the backing of such companiesÂ as IBM, Google, Novell, Sun, and open-source players. Open XML is the default file format for Microsoft's Office 2007 desktop applications suite. What has yet to become clear is which document format users will favor -- ODF or Open XML -- or whether they'd adopt a mix of the two. Some vendors, such as Corel, have already announced they're adopting a neutral approach and will support both formats in their software. IT users and governments around the world are expressing interest in open-standard document formats to help ensure continued access to archived information and also free them from having to use Microsoft's Office software. In December, standards body ECMA International voted 20 to 1 to approve Open XML as a global standard and submitted the format to ISO for its approval. The dissenting vote came from IBM, according to Microsoft. "IBM has declared victory in blocking Open XML," the Microsoft letter alleges, claiming that IBM is holding up the standards process in a "blatant attempt" to limit choice in the marketplace designed to favor the vendor's Lotus Notes groupware, which doesn't support Open XML. Microsoft and IBM are the two leading desktop collaboration software vendors with IBM's Notes pitted against Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange software. Microsoft is fearful that ODF may become the de facto electronic document format by default simply because it was first to achieve ISO recognition as an international standard, the letter stated. "In XML-based file formats, which can easily interoperate through translators and be implemented side by side in productivity software, this exclusivity makes no sense -- except to those who lack confidence in their ability to compete in the marketplace on the technical merits of their alternative standard," the letter continued. "This campaign to limit choice and force their single standard on consumers should be resisted." The timing of the release of Microsoft's letter is interesting given that it comes a day after the Oasis standards body announced its approval of a new version of the ODF standard, OpenDocument 1.1. The changes in ODF 1.1 are designed to address concerns voiced by advocacy groups that the previous release didn't meet the needs of people with disabilities. The level of accessibility support provided in ODF 1.1 is now on a par or exceeds that available in other file formats. Â
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New versions of Office, Exchange, too. But are businesses ready to buy?
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InfoWorld - It may be too early to talk plug-and-play but IBM&#160;believes it can help businesses of all sizes easily cluster their servers to handle intensive computing workloads.
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IBM  said on Sunday it  will offer an open desktop software system for businesses that  puts the cost of managing Apple or Linux computers on a more  equal footing with Microsoft's Windows software, improving the  economics of Windows alternatives.
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(InfoWorld) - People apparently are already tuning in to IBM's Symphony. The company reported Wednesday thatÂ its free rival to Microsoft's Office suiteÂ was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release. "To be honest, we were surprised at the speed with which people jumped on this," said Mike Rhodin, general manager of both IBM Collaboration and Lotus Software, in an interview Wednesday. To keep up with the number of people interested in downloading Symphony, IBM tripled the number of download servers it had for the suite of productivity applications in the first few days of its release, he said. At first, users had to sign up for an IBM ID and password and enter identity information to download the first beta of Symphony, a free suite of office productivity applications made available last Tuesday, but users complained that this process was "too onerous," Rhodin said. IBM tweaked the process so now all people need to get Symphony is a valid e-mail address. Because of this, it's been hard to track whether it's consumers or businesses that are downloading Symphony, he said. But IBM is less interested in who is using the software than in getting it into as many hands as possible, Rhodin said. Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse framework and is meant not only to give consumers and businesses an alternative to Microsoft Office, but also to promote the use of ODF (Open Document for XML), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). "The end goal here is the proliferation of the open standard," Rhodin said. Microsoft Office 2007, which has more than 90 percent market share, does not natively support ODF and instead uses the company'sÂ OOXML (Open XML) format, which failed to pass a recent ISO vote for standardization. IBM and ODF supporters like Sun and Google have been waging a public battle against Microsoft to promote their interest in ODF, on which all three companies have based productivity applications. The Microsoft competitors are hoping that because ODF is a standard and Office does not support it, more users will begin purchasing ODF-friendly software, thus giving competing players more of a chance against Microsoft's dominance in the productivity-application market. Symphony joins Sun's for-fee version of StarOffice as the latest software suite based on OpenOffice.org code to go up against Microsoft Office. So far, neither the free nor for-fee versions of OpenOffice.org have achieved any real success in cutting into Office's market share or revenue. IBM only recently joined the OpenOffice.org communityÂ after holding off for many years, and Rhodin said Symphony is not meant to be a slight against the suite that is freely available from that organization. But IBM is clearly interested in being more successful than its rivals in presenting a true alternative to Office as a way to promote ODF. "This isn't just another OpenOffice suite," he said. "We have made investments in OpenOffice.org to create an enterprise experience around it." As a part of this, IBM based Symphony on the Eclipse open-source development framework so it would be easy for third-party ISVs to build plug-in applications for the suite much like third parties have built applications for Office. In fact, one company in Brazil, Totvs, is already building an ERP application on Symphony, he said. And before Symphony was released as a stand-alone product,Â IBM had already included it in Lotus Notes 8, the latest version of its collaboration software, another arena in which it is tweaking its strategy to battle with Microsoft. Office is playing an increasingly important role for Microsoft in this market as the company hopes to leverage the ubiquity of Office among business users by making its applications the front-end interface for worker collaboration. So far, Symphony is getting decent reviews among users, and analysts think IBM, because of its successful software history, has a better chance than others at giving Microsoft Office some real competition. "IBM is the 800-pound gorilla in enterprise software, and Microsoft's main rival for information worker productivity tools," wrote IDC analyst Melissa Webster in a research report published Wednesday. "And Symphony addresses the concerns that potential OpenOffice.org users might have had in regard to using open-source software: Symphony is backed by the IBM brand and is provided as a commercially developed and supported product suite." IBM plans to release a second beta of Symphony in the next six to eight weeks with a general availability release of the software to come early next year, Rhodin said. At that time, IBM will offer enterprise support for the suite for a fee, though he acknowledged that IBM doesn't really expect to sell much of that support and is only providing it so enterprises will feel more comfortable implementing Symphony.