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IBM’s Lotus Symphony, a free competitor to Microsoft based on the OpenOffice.org has been polished up with final touches and the office suite has been put out as version 1.0. The public beta had been roaming out since last year.

Lotus Symphony is unlike OpenOffice.org as it is not open source, hat has been out with its last version 1.1.4 that lets developers to alter codes and keep the alterations to themselves (private).

The purpose is to provide free software as an alternative to Microsoft Office and charging $25,000 a year for support. Pretty pointless as any user who knows how to operate the office suite won’t have to pay a penny. The drawback here is that Lotus Symphony doesn’t offer varying features that make it different from OpenOffice.org.

The quite is available for Linux, Windows; however the support for Linux platforms is limited to Red Hat Linux 5 and SUSE Enterprise Desktop 10. The user might find himself, encountering a few errors now and then but with time they might just improve at it (though it’s quite a surprise that a full version being released after a year of beta trial still has errors).

A few features of the suite are;

• The total support for languages is now 28 with additional support for 4 more
• Fixing of critical crash issues
• Efficient reciprocated use with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and SmartSuite documents

Better performance on creating new documents, spell check presentations etc

With same features available on the OpenOffice.org I personally don’t think IBM a chance worth standing against the firmly placed Microsoft Office and then the OpeOffice.org suite. The only difference I see apart from usability is the stamp of IBM, Lotus need to try something better to improve its user base, as in make it open source and integrate those developments into their suite. Its something not worth the wait it has kept users in my humble opinion.

The software is available for download here.