First released in May 2008, Lotus Symphony is a suite of office applications developed by IBM. Similar to Microsoft Office, Lotus Symphony offers the ability to create/share/edit texts, presentations, and spreadsheets. Unlike its Microsoft counterpart, the IBM suite gives its users the ability to open a text/presentation/spreadsheet application from the same location. You can practically write a document, fill out a spreadsheet, and prepare a presentation in parallel, from the same place.

Lotus Symphony is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and is free to download and install. The office suite is made up of three applications: IBM Lotus Symphony Documents, IBM Lotus Symphony Presentations, IBM Lotus Symphony spreadsheet.

It is important to know that IBM Lotus Symphony owes most of its core to OpenOffice.org 3. Therefore, there are many similarities in terms of features and capabilities between Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice.

The good

* A big advantage of Symphony is the fact that it is free

* Users do not need to worry about software licenses

* It is compatible with the three main operating systems: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X

* It is compatible with OpenDocument and Microsoft Office formats

* It is capable of exporting PDF files (Portable Document Format)

* Is a good business resource, able to take care of daily tasks in an office

* Has a friendly user interface and familiar features (formatting tools, editing tools, etc.)

* Has an easy to use Java interface to handle document creation and manipulation

* Symphony is based on Eclipse technology, which means it’s easy to customize for the daily needs of a business

* It is compatible with Microsoft Automatic technology: it can be controlled from external programs

The bad

* Performance issues: you have to wait a few seconds before the app opens

* Although it is compatible with .doc, .docx, .xls, .pptx type documents, the user may lose some quality along the way

* Does not have customer email

* Does not have a database

The ugly one

* Its basic features make Symphony suitable for simple office tasks, but it is not a good choice when it comes to more complex tasks.

With 12 million users (as stated by IBM in February 2010), the IBM suite is a good tool for small businesses and users who require basic features and average performance from an open suite. The advantages of using Lotus Symphony outweigh the disadvantages, but even so, the latter are more important and play an important role when a company decides to choose an office suite.

However, the third version 3.0 includes several enhancements (sidebars and Visual Basic support), and IBM’s suite is likely to get better and better, pointing to more powerful features and performance improvements.