At the OpenOffice.org (OO) Conference today in Beijing, China, IBM unveiled its roadmap for the expansion of the free Lotus Symphony office applications suite for Mac OS X, Linux, OpenOffice 3.0 and Microsoft Office customers. IBM’s Michael Karasick, Director of IBM Lotus China Development Labs, told the audience that IBM is deeply committed to Symphony and the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Moreover, in outlining future plans the Symphony roadmap for 2009 means the suite will be entirely developed on the ODF 1.2 and OpenOffice 3.0 software code base.
Symphony for Mac Biggest Request
Originally released as a public beta for Windows in September of 2007, the latest release of Symphony now has a native Mac OS X version. Symphony for Mac OS X has been the top request made by members of the Symphony community, reflecting Apple’s burgeoning popularity with its Mac line of computers.
“Support for Mac and Ubuntu are good examples of IBM’s long-term commitment to critical standards like the Open Document format,” said Karasick. “As we rebase Symphony on OpenOffice 3.0, we are very excited about providing next-generation document creation and collaboration capabilities for the millions of potential users out there. IBM also sees the potential for the global developer community to use Symphony extensibility in concert with that of ODF 1.2, so that documents can be more deeply integrated into business applications and processes.”
Aqua and Symphony Rock Together
IBM’s Symphony development team worked hard to make sure the Mac OS X version of Symphony not only worked well on Macs but is tuned to take advantage of Apple’s Aqua graphical user-interface technology. The Mac version of Symphony is initially available in English but other languages will be available as it progresses.
To learn more visit IBM’s Lotus Symphony webpage.
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