IBM Lotus Symphony

Slowly we have been migrating from Microsoft Office to the open source office suite OpenOffice.  I’ve yet to find a reason why an entire organization could not productively drop Microsoft Office and switch to Open Office for their document/presentation/spreadsheet/desktop database requirements.  A nice integrated feature is the ability to generate a PDF document for distribution.  There’s even a useful Draw program that is missing from the Microsoft suite.  And, of course, OpenOffice runs on all the major operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Recently, I upgraded to the most recent IBM Lotus Symphony, which is based on OpenOffice.  I think they’ve done a good job of integrating the various tools into a single user experience, which might be important for some organizations.

For developers, IBM built Lotus Symphony using the Eclipse IDE (and is built as an Eclipse RCP application), and therefore is extendable via Eclipse plugins.  This means that organization can safely customize the Lotus Symphony using standard Eclipse and Java technologies.

With IT budgets being squeezed, migrating to OpenOffice strikes me as a no-brainer.