IBM Lotus Symphony is one of the newer free office productivity suites out there, although the Lotus name itself has a long pedigree. Like OpenOffice.org -- a free productivity suite fostered by Sun Microsystems -- Lotus Symphony uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), with reverse-engineered support for Microsoft Office formats, such as doc and xls.

I decided to try the latest Lotus Symphony Beta 4 to see how it compares with typical office suite products, particularly my currently standard, OpenOffice.org 2.4.

Unlike conventional office suites that have different programs for word processing and spreadsheets, Lotus Symphony handles everything within one program. While combining an entire office suite into one program offers great integration and convenience, it inevitably leads to program bloat due to the inherent complexity of the codebase and its dependencies.

Read the complete article by Will Kraft in Application Development Trends.