Free And Freer: Lotus Symphony Could Be Your Unsung Hero, But Only If You Hear About It
Everyone knows that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Or is it? With its free productivity tools suite Symphony, IBM/Lotus is looking to shake things up a bit, putting even greater pressure on Microsoft’s Office margin and besting Google and Zoho as the lowest-cost alternative.
So far, enterprise customers have been reluctant to move away from Office due to concerns about supporting a new or multiple environments, document formats, user acceptance, and proof of savings after change management costs are figured in. But with the lure of free or much lower-cost alternatives available, CIOs are reexamining these investments in a suddenly interesting market given the economic climate. With its Open Office-based Symphony, Lotus provides a robust tool set that is enterprise-ready. To make the point, 40,000 of IBM’s information workers recently made the jump off Office onto Symphony 1.2, and all of the conference materials for last week’s Lotusphere09