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IBM’s new kid on the block is Lotus Symphony which we covered some days ago. I gave it a try to find out how it fares against the King of Office Suites, Microsoft Word. Lotus Symphony is based on Open Office.org but made by IBM so it does have a lot of workforce going behind it, and dare I say, I expect better and more professional work done on this product than on Open Office itself. To see this, I gave it a little test run, and came across these points at a glance.

• There are Performance settings in the preferences which have a great effect on performance, but in my opinion it should automatically detect hardware configuration, it’s not the 90’s, so software should be intelligent itself!
• Tabbed interface is good and useful.
• The UI is overall pleasing to the eyes, but the buttons look way too old.
• No Microsoft Office Ribbon but the UI isn’t bad for a free product.
• Thumbnails search feature just a gimmick. Doesn’t search through documents, just filters by the document name
• No header or footer themes like Office Word, which I find very useful.
• The graphics options look absolutely cheap to say the least, have to dig around to get to them.
• First time use of help requires Indexing to be done, which should be done in setup. Very annoying!

From first looks, it looks good enough for a free product. If you can’t afford Microsoft Office, do give it a try. It surely does look like an IBM product from all views but it’s useful none the less.

I’ll go through deeper and technical analysis of this product soon. Stay tuned!