Lotus Symphony is getting great reviews, including CRN’s “Symphony Sings as Office Clone.”

They found it preferable, in their review, to OpenOffice.org:

“The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless. While OpenOffice was a nice alternative, Symphony looks and works much more elegantly while keeping the free price tag.”

A Mac version is not yet available, but is promised later this summer, and Symphony 2.0 (unclear when it is planned for release) will “update the base code engine and also include more OpenOffice.org features, such as an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program.”

Symphony’s arrival on the scene makes a good complement (and friendly competitor) to OpenOffice. It helps legitimize the idea of using ODF as a format for interoperability, and it helps sell ODF to enterprises. It’s also been imaginative in testing new user interface ideas, which will help move the industry forward much more than MS Office 2007’s dubious new choices.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under ODF, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.