No alternative to Microsoft Office? We beg to differ

“What we are trying to do with Symphony is establish that there is an option in the market and companies don’t have to spend the money they spend for productivity suites,” says Ed Brill, director of product management for Lotus Software.

NetworkWorld.com has an article up today which outlines the latest upgrades that IBM has done to our 15 month old Lotus Symphony to compete with Microsoft Office, except that we are offering it for free.

“Symphony is not a product that we just threw out there,” said Brill. “We have been investing in an on-going basis.”

IBM plans to release Symphony 2.0 in 2010, the same timeframe Microsoft plans the next version of Office. Code named Vienna, the Symphony 2.0 software will be based on the most recent version of OpenOffice.

But for now IBM, which offers Symphony as a free download and the default productivity software in Notes/Domino 8, is adding a new set of drag-and-drop widgets that include integration with popular Microsoft backend software such as the SharePoint Server. The software also integrates with Google Gadgets and Lotus’s own Sametime and Connections platforms.

Due to popular demand, I’ll be working with Joyce Davis to highlight these widgets for Lotus Notes and Symphony widgets in full detail in the upcoming blog posts.

Check out the rest of the article here.