IBM has released a suite of free enterprise-grade office document tools for creating and sharing word-processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Called IBM Lotus Symphony, the suite is made up of the same apps that are built into Lotus Notes 8, though the names are tweaked: Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, and Lotus Symphony Presentations.

Although the Symphony applications are compatible with Microsoft Office files -- .doc, .xls, .ppt -- IBM's move is akin to the company slamming the door on Microsoft Office. IBM has used its own productivity tools for quite some time, but today's announcement gives Symphony away to anyone who wants it -- everyday consumers, too, who have little to do with IBM's business offerings. That's big backing from an influential worldwide IT company.

Documents as Commodities

"IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux," noted Steve Mills, a senior vice president in IBM's Software Group. "The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. When those documents are based on proprietary software, only future versions of the same software will be able to access that intelligence. This dynamic forces companies to keep paying license and maintenance fees to the same vendor for a basic commodity. Now businesses can unlock their critical office information free of the costs and controls of any vendor."

Mills said the move has more to do with extending the reach of office-type files. "It's not about the document on the desktop anymore. It's all about making information universally accessible and putting it to work on any platform and on the web in highly flexible ways," he explained.

Symphony runs on Windows XP, Vista, and Linux and is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, letting you export documents to Adobe PDF files. IBM Lotus says it plans to support Mac OS X in the future.

OpenOffice.org

Last week, IBM announced its membership in OpenOffice.org. IBM has used some of the organization's open-source code in its solutions, and now IBM will contribute it's own code to the OpenOffice.org effort.

Since the project's creation by Sun Microsystems in 2000, nearly 100 million people have downloaded the product, and thousands of developers and organizations have contributed to it. It's available on many platforms in multiple languages.

Microsoft, by the way, has been facing additional Office-related competition from Google Apps, which offers free online productivity applications, and Apple, which just added a spreadsheet application, called Numbers, to its own office productivity suite, iWork.