The Hindu Business Line : IBM frees 3 office software tools

Bangalore, Sept. 20 OpenOffice.org member IBM has freed three software applications for users of office software. Lotus Symphony — a suite of three open source tools Lotus Symphony Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations — is now available for download at www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony.

Last week, IBM announced its membership in OpenOffice.org and intent to make important technical and resource contributions.

Applications’ features

The applications support both Windows and Linux desktops.

They open multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and Open Document Format (ODF), PDFs etc.

Based on ODF, Lotus Symphony allows organisations to access, use and maintain all their documents for a long-term, without worrying about ongoing software licensing and royalty fees. Since it belongs to the Lotus suite of products, users of IBM’s collaboration software such as the recently released Lotus 8.0, will find integration easy.

Linking ERP system

Companies can integrate IBM Lotus Symphony tools into their custom applications. For example, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can be linked directly into a user’s workspace. The user can submit queries to the ERP system.

Responses from the ERP application arrive at the user’s workspace, where IBM Lotus Symphony Documents automatically populates the fields in a customer’s shipping invoice. All of this can be accomplished immediately, with the user having a consistent consolidated view of the task at hand.

“IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux,” said Mr Chetan Yardi, Country Manager, Lotus, IBM India/South Asia, in a statement.