IBM has tripled the number of download servers for its Symphony suite of free productivity apps, which compete with Microsoft Office and promote the ODF format

People apparently are already tuning in to IBM's Symphony. The company reported Wednesday that its free rival to Microsoft's Office suite was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release.

IBM today announced IBM Lotus Symphony, a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Beginning today at www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony, business, academic, governmental and consumer users alike can download this enterprise-grade office software, which is the same tool inside some of IBM's most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8. In addition, these tools can be used to seamlessly extend a business process or custom application to create dynamic composite applications.

by Eric Armstrong, Blog

Some folks here are taking a very strong look at DITA. I'm certainly one of them. But we also have a huge legacy of documents in Solbook format (Sun's subset of DocBook). There are tools for editing such documents, and tools for processing them. and there are many people who are comfortable with those tools. So DITA isn't going to replace the world, just yet.

After years of holding out, IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software.

IT managers at large organizations are increasingly interested in employing XML-based standards, including Open XML, among their document standards, according to a study of U.S. and European organizations commissioned by Microsoft Corp. The results of the survey, which polled 200 government and private-sector organizations to better understand which factors drive adoption of open document standards, are available in an IDC white paper.