Lotus Symphony Relaunches as an Open Source Office Suite

Anyone remember Lotus Symphony, the DOS-based follow-up to Lotus 1-2-3? It was certainly not as successful as 1-2-3, by any stretch of the imagination, and its separate components, with the exception of the spreadsheet, naturally, were underpowered at best.

Today IBM announced it was relaunching the Symphony application suite, this time as open source, driven off of last week's announcement of its new membership in OpenOffice.org. From today's press release:

Beginning today at www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony, business, academic, governmental and consumer users alike can download this enterprise-grade office software, which is the same tool inside some of IBM's most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8. In addition, these tools can be used to seamlessly extend a business process or custom application to create dynamic composite applications.

There are three core applications: Symphony Documents, Symphony Spreadsheets and Symphony Presentations -- and I'm sure you can guess their functions based on their names. The software supports both Open Document Format and Microsoft Office formats - though none of this should be surprising based on the OpenOffice.org roots of this suite.

Of course, OpenOffice has failed to dent Microsoft's monopoly on office suite software to any large extent and honestly, I doubt backing by IBM will make much of a difference. To be honest, nothing IBM has ever put out (software-wise), before or after the Lotus acquisition, has ever excited me. My guess would be this wouldn't excite me either, except it leverages OpenOffice.

Still, the one piece of Office I can't get rid of (and I'd really like to), which keeps me chained to it, is Outlook. I wish someone could come up with an open source replacement for that.