IBM has announced that it is providing support for Microsoft Office 2007 with the new version of Lotus Symphony.
The company claims that by importing Microsoft Office 2007 files into Symphony, Microsoft Office customers can save on licensing costs by switching to Symphony while retaining access to the contents of their office files.
The new productivity software suite provides animation to presentations and interoperates with Microsoft powerpoint presentations. The company said that version 1.3 allows users to drag-and-drop plug-ins, extending its use to other business applications.
It permits the users to export the files of MS Office 2007 format to other formats like ODF and Adobe PDF.
The new version also offers DataPilot table features designed to drill down and analyse data and enhance mail merge and envelope printing for organisations.
Kevin Cavanaugh, VP of Lotus Software, said: IBM is delivering on its commitment to free businesses and consumers from having to pay licensing fees over and over just to access their own personal or company information. Now, it will be much harder to justify paying Office licensing fees when you can preserve and access your Office documents for free using Lotus Symphony.
First released in 2007, IBM’s Lotus Symphony is described as a suite of applications for creating, editing and sharing text, spreadsheet, presentations and other documents. Earlier, media reports noted that the beta version of Lotus Symphony had performance and feature-set issues.
