In just one week of availability, IBM's free office productivity suite, Lotus Symphony, has been downloaded by more than 100,000 registered business and consumer users. The Lotus Symphony website [2] garnered more than a million visitors in the same time period.

The download figure is a record for IBM software, the company says, and it surpasses the previous record held by Lotus Notes, IBM's most widely used product, with 135 million licensed users. Of course, Lotus Symphony is free while Lotus Notes is not, so the comparison is a bit tangential.

Lotus Symphony is already fully integrated into Lotus Notes 8, which gives users easy access to productivity tools as part of their desktop experience. Plus, the Symphony tools are compatible with Microsoft Office documents, as well as with the Open Document Format (ODF), which makes the information in the document available independent of the application that created it.

Community Support

Since the Symphony website began offering access to the beta version of Symphony software on September 18, a user community has formed to share experiences and post suggestions for new features, IBM says. For example, members have assisted each another with installation and usage questions, and individual users are responding to each other. Between IBM's support team response and the community response, answers to user questions and usage suggestions are happening in near realtime. In fact, IBM boasts, support forum posts have accelerated from less than 100 the first day to more than 600 daily. Community members are also providing feedback on capabilities they wish to see in future releases.

What is the point of all this and IBM's press release about it? Lotus Symphony, even though it's free, will have options available for support, which is important for organizations considering the adoption of Symphony over the market-dominating Microsoft Office. In addition, IBM wants to foster this community to help drive product development priorities for upcoming releases.

"There is an evolution taking place in the way documents are being used for collaboration," said Mike Rhodin, IBM's general manager of IBM Collaboration/Lotus Software. "Millions are seeing it. It's more than a free download. This tidal wave of adoption is creating an independent mass of users accustomed to open documents and poised to benefit from the innovative new capabilities they will soon afford."

IBM says it is working with the ODF standard to bring innovative new capabilities to documents, enabling them to interact with business information such as enterprise resource planning and supply chain management held in other documents and on the Internet. Lotus Symphony's IBM-developed accessibility features represent the first donation by IBM to the OpenOffice.org community since it formally joined and committed to make important technical and resource contributions. By teaming with the community to accelerate the rate of innovation in the office productivity software marketplace, IBM expects to deliver higher value to users of its products and services. IBM hopes this will lead to a broader range of solutions and ODF-supported applications that draw from the OpenOffice.org technology.