Ktn

By now you may have already seen the announcement and press releases around the release of a free office suite that you can take advantage of (and stay legal or to not buy expensive licenses of products that pack tons of things that you never use, you know who “those” are ).

Yep, it’s IBM Lotus Symphony and as I was reading through the press release I saw that it mentions that it “is the same tool inside some of IBM’s most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8“, so this made me realize that this is actually what we (as of a couple of days) called IBM Productivity Tools (you can see this mentioned on Luis’ blog post titled Finally Joining the *Expensive* Mac Side!) and that I tried as Hannover Productivity Tools back in January! What a nice surprise!

For those that like to read and be up to date and the several happenings, here are some online articles that talk about it:

• IBM’s Symphony Slams Door on Microsoft Office (System iNetwork)
• Free IBM Software Is Bid to Challenge Microsoft Office (WSJ.com)
• I.B.M. to Offer Office Software Free in Challenge to Microsoft’s Line (New York Times)
• Rivals make run at Microsoft Office (CNET News.com)
• IBM takes on Microsoft Office again with Lotus Symphony (Tech news blog - CNET News.com)
• IBM To Offer Free Office Software In Challenge To Microsoft (InformationWeek)
• IBM’s attacks Microsoft with an OpenOffice symphony (Between the Lines - ZDNet.com)
• IBM Launches Lotus Symphony (Open Sources - InfoWorld)
• IBM Challenges Microsoft with Free Office Suite (Slashdot)
• IBM to launch free rival to Microsoft’s Office software (Forbes.com)
• IBM to offer free word processing, office software (Reuters)

Try them and let the Lotus guys know what you don’t like or if you find bugs. Oh, yes, here’s the link to the support forums.