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IBM is trying once again to enter into the office market by their latest endeavor of Lotus Symphony. I have to say when I hear the words IBM and Lotus I think of Lotus Notes, then I get a little sick to my stomach, and start to retch and I usually end up puking on who ever mentioned the words. I’ve managed environments using Lotus and I hated it! But I figure they deserve another shot, and hey it’s free so how can I complain.

Initial Reaction
Upon initially opening Lotus Symphony it reminds me a lot of Open Office, however their use of the side bar reminds me of Office. I can honestly say this appears to be a hybrid if you will of MSOffice 2003 and Open Office. As I just mentioned the side bard allows you access to text properties and paragraph properties for quick and simple formating of your text. the upper navigational bar at first appears to be in a very odd order starting with Cut, copy, paste…then open new doc, save…etc. However the more I think about it this layout does make quite a bit of sense, after all my first reaction when needing a tool bard option is probably not to want to open another document.

What really has impressed me is the tabbed layout (much like our beloved firefox) of documents. But wait, I’m not limited to only having “documents” open in this tabbed view, I can have a word document, a presentation, and a spreadsheet open all in the same application and then flip between them! Working in the Church world, my head spins at the possibilities a Pastor could have being able to have his sermon open, build his presentation and at the same time balance my departmental budget! Whooo-hoo!

Documents
IBM has built in the ability to Export to PDF from the “File” menu and files are defaultly stored in the blessed Open Document Text or ODT but can be saved as a OTT, SXW,STW, DOC, DOT, RTF, TXT.

Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets can be saved as ODS, OTS, SXC, STC, XLS, XLT, & CSV formats. All in all it’s a spreadsheet program, and seems to do all the things a spreadsheet program should do.

Presentations
I’m picky about presentation programs, OO.org has done nothing but depress me, and it’s about a friendly as a rabbies infected bunny. The interface here is much better, the animations are a little simple but it could be an issue of just learning how to use it. Presentations can be saved as ODP, OTP, SXI, STI, PPT, & POT.

Overall Thoughts
Honestly, I’m impressed, it’s simle, straight forward, and the tabbed concept is amazing!! Fortunately for most of you Lotus Symphony is available free of charge to Windows and LInux users. However for us mac lovers you’ll have to wait. Their are rumors of a mac version coming, and I hope it’s true!

To learn more about Lotus Symphony or to give it a try for your self visit http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa