IBM yesterday announced "a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations." In other words, a rival to Microsoft Office. IBM Lotus Symphony is available to all from the IBM Lotus Symphony website: http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa.

Symphony includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool  (the same as the productivity editors included in Lotus Notes 8 - all running on Windows and Linux, and support Open Document Formats and Microsoft Office (XP etc) formats, as well as supporting a PDF export capability.

"With Lotus Symphony," according to IBM, "you can import, edit and save a variety of file formats including Microsoft Office files. You can even export your documents to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). The tools work with computers running both Microsoft Windows and Linux- environments, with support for Apple Macintosh planned for the future."

Lotus Symphony is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard - which means users are not locked into proprietary file formats, software licensing agreements and/or upgrades.  IBM hopes that business, academic, governmental and consumer users alike will download this enterprise-grade office software.

“There is nothing that advances a standard like a product that uses it,” said Steve Mills, SVP of IBM’s software group, referring to the OpenDocument Format.

Just last week IBM joined Openoffice.org, and was warmly welcomed by Sun's CEO.