Using the open office source code and the eclipse framework Lotus has created Symphony; which for basic text editing / presentations / spreadsheets works great. It’s completely free too, who can complain? The majority of Microsoft Office functionality lays unused so in this context it seems ridiculous to pay for that privilege.
By the end of the year it will be compatible with the latest version of office, and by 2010 will be aimed at more than just basic users with macros and other functionality being introduced.
The other side to this story is Project Liberate: “An IBM complementary Consulting Engagement to help customers understand alternatives when negotiating a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement”. A bold move when IBM openly admits Symphony is an inferior office product, but this is a long term strategy and at least they are contributing the developments back into the openoffice.org community.
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3 comments:
I think really the key to the success of any of these alternative type approaches or even a tiered approach to providing these type of services across the enterprise is the interoperability of the various solutions. The easier to move from one to the other documents etc the easier it is to have a tiered strategy. Good stuff
I think Symphony could play a niche role in an organisation. I agree that most people only use a fraction of the functions in an office application but it's also a very fundamental tool. You can argue that in the future the office suites will be replaced by rich web applications. That's probably true but it will take a long time.
I've used Symphony and I have to say my experience was very bad. It was slow (glacial to startup in the first place) and most of the office documents I opened didn't render correctly.
If you are going to use such a cut down tool why even install it yourself, just use Google Apps.
It might be expensive and I might not use all the features but I'm much more productive with my copy of Office 2007.
Agree. Symphony is not really ready for widestream use - its purpose is to drive ODF adoption and erode Microsofts dominance of the document file formats. The functionality in the research labs that will go into Symphony (including the browser based functionality) in the future certainly points to a much richer and viable alternative to Office. We'll reach a point where Microsoft will need to respond to an alternative, free office productivity suite, but Symphony isn't forcing their hand yet :-)
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