IBM has been a significant promoter of two of my major interests: wikis (specifically for corporate intranet content management) and OpenOffice.org (specifically, IBM’s “distro” of it called Lotus Symphony).

One place where the two converge is in the Lotus Symphony Wiki, developed as a collaborative space for Symphony-related information.

IBM’s wiki engine has a very strong design architecture and user interface, so I’d like to learn more about it. (I have not seen it in use elsewhere, so I wonder if it’s in-house, or expensive, or targeted only to big enterprises…) Likewise, Symphony itself has been a great citizen of the OpenOffice ecosystem, introducing creative new user interface concepts that I think could be adopted by OOo itself (especially document window tabs and a tools sidebar).

One approach I think Symphony could take that OOo itself has struggled with, is to achieve pre-installation on new computers from OEMs. IBM’s relationship with Lenovo should help convince them to offer Symphony instead of Microsoft Works, at the very least. OEM installations would help introduce Symphony and the ODF format to many new users, helping to further expand its global userbase.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under Free Culture, ODF, OpenOffice.org, Wiki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.