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Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4: A Free (and Fabulous) Alternative to Microsoft Office |
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Freitag, den 01. Oktober 2010 um 18:24 Uhr |
Quelle: http://www.bnet.com/blog/businesstips/lotus-symphony-3-beta-4-a-free-and-fabulous-alternative-to-microsoft-office/8794
Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4: A Free (and Fabulous) Alternative to Microsoft Office
Let’s face it: Microsoft Office is overkill for a lot of users. And if you don’t need Outlook, you can easily get by with a suite that costs less — a lot less. My Office alternative of choice: Lotus Symphony 3.
Symphony is like a more user-friendly, less feature-packed version of OpenOffice (which, incidentally, is the foundation upon which Symphony was built). It has just three modules: Documents, Presentations, and Spreadsheets, all of which are file-compatible with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, respectively. (If you’re looking for drawing tools and databases, you’ll need to go with OpenOffice.)
The just-released Beta 4 offers faster startup, better stability, support for additional language dictionaries, and more enhancements and bug fixes than I can list here.
Interestingly, this promises to be the final beta before Symphony 3 goes gold, so if you’re not keen on using beta software for mission-critical documents, it shouldn’t be too long a wait.
The program is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and 7. I use it on my laptop, and while I do occasionally miss a few of Office’s amenities, for the most part it handles all my document needs. For free.
As we get close to a Q4 2010 release of Lotus Symphony 3.0, the development team has begun to scope out the subsequent feature release for the product. As with many of our development organizations, they listen closely to the input on Elguji's IdeaJam.net as a source of feedback and weighting for future features.
The Symphony lab team has posted a number of the feature requests that they have received or imagined into the IdeaJam already. There are some great ideas already posted, such as the one above, and you can vote on those as well as submitting your own. Check out the Symphony category for all the feature ideas.
I have to say, a part of me was extremely uncomfortable as I reviewed the feature ideas posted here. We -- IBM, by contributing these ideas -- are essentially highlighting here some of the limitations of Symphony, even ones that will be in the 3.0 release. In other products, I would be extremely hesitant, and would probably have dashed off a note asking someone to "take those down before the competition makes an issue out of them".
In Symphony, though, what's the risk? It's a free product designed not just to be a really great office productivity tool, but also to create competitive pressure (technology and price-wise) in the market. We are doing a great release in 3.0 and are committed to continue to deliver a compelling experience. You can help us decide what's important in moving forward.
IBM Lotus Symphony Release Notes
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