IBM Revs MS Office Challenger, Lotus Symphony

IBM has announced that its Lotus Symphony suite of desktop office software is now available in 24 languages, serving major markets worldwide and presenting a greater challenge to Microsoft’s market-leading Office suite.

“Customers want an open alternative to desktop software that gives them the flexibility to innovate,” said Steve Mills, SVP and group executive, IBM Software Group. “This is increasingly important as the workforce requires tools to collaborate seamlessly across borders and languages in the globally integrated economy, which represents the future of work.”

Lotus Symphony is a suite of software tools for creating text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents – the most frequently used desktop tools – based on OpenOffice code. It supports the OpenDocument format (ODF), Microsoft Office, and Lotus SmartSuite formats.

IBM said it has employed innovative development techniques in the development and translation of Lotus Symphony. Lotus Symphony was developed by a global network of IBM laboratories led by a core team in Beijing, China using agile development techniques that enabled work to continue seamlessly and in parallel on components of the product at all times.

IBM said that since its release in September 2007, the English version of Lotus Symphony software has received worldwide interest. As Computer Business Review reported in early September, the Lotus Symphony web site attracted 100,000 registered users within its first week of launch, breaking previous IBM product download records.

Meanwhile, Lotus Symphony’s IBM-developed document accessibility features represent the first donation by IBM to the OpenOffice.org community since it formally joined. IBM expects to drive more ODF-based applications on the OpenOffice.org technology and is currently working with ODF formats to allow documents to interact better with business information such as ERP and supply chain management.

The top markets for Symphony adoption that now have local language support include: Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Indonesia, Poland, China, the Russian Federation, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Korea, Denmark, and Taiwan. The leading market for Symphony to date is the US, with about 25% of downloads.

Since Symphony was developed using the Eclipse-based Lotus Expeditor open framework, IBM has the flexibility to install additional language packs that include spell check dictionaries. Users can install any number of these additional language packs. IBM said that in the globally integrated business world, this allows users not only to interact with Symphony in their native languages, but also to create content in a different language with the confidence of language-specific spell check support.

Our View

Microsoft Office may still be far and away the dominant office suite, with about 95% market share and over 400 million licenses worldwide, but IBM is piling on the pressure with Symphony, which is free to download, and also its paid-for Workplace suite.

Other competitors include Google Docs, the open source Zoho and OpenOffice, Sun’s StarOffice (based on OpenOffice), and others specializing in word processing, spreadsheets, or other individual elements of a typical office suite.

Perhaps the stiffest competition though to Microsoft’s office suite is not an individual rival, but the growing desire especially in public sector organizations for support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF), supported by Sun, IBM, and others.

Microsoft does enable compatibility with its own Office Open XML document format through a bridging plug-in, but it does not support ODF natively.

In any case, the growing popularity of ODF has helped raise the profile of Microsoft Office competitors while Microsoft has been slow to offer native support, and it also creates a more level playing field for those competitors that could see them gain a little more traction.

For users, the increasing popularity of ODF means it is less necessary to stick to Microsoft Office when seeking to ensure compatibility with other office documents, whether created inside or outside their own organizations. Still, with about 95% market share, Microsoft won’t be panicking any time soon.