IBM Lotus Symphony FREE Beta 4

By William Bryant at 6 February, 2008, 4:49 pm

Most of you, I’m sure, use Microsoft Office for your day-to-day business activities. Some of you may have heard of the free office application, OpenOffice.org, which has most of the features available in Microsoft Office for the grand total of $0.

IBM has been growing their open source business vastly in the past several years, and the Lotus Symphony project is a fine example of their work. Lotus Symphony is actually made on the OpenOffice platform, but it’s much prettier.

I use this on my computer, and it’s every bit as capable as Microsoft Office only without the bloat, without the cost, and with a much prettier interface. Plus, plug-in support and a developer tool kit has been released so that developers can plug in the latest gadgets and gizmos, so the speak, like in Firefox or other open-source software. Best of all, did I mention… it’s free! What have you seen IBM offer that was actually free?