IBM's Lotus Symphony 1.0 emerges from beta

Emerging from a public beta process which began last September, the Lotus brand once again represents a suite of general purpose applications...and it doesn't look to make much money from that just yet.

The game is officially joined. Up to now, the leading full-release application suites supporting OpenDocument Format have been the open source OpenOffice, Sun's commercial StarOffice, and Corel's commercial WordPerfect Office. We know the next version of Microsoft Office, currently code-named "Office 14," will support ODF optionally the way WordPerfect Office does now.

As of today, IBM is fully in the game, having released version 1.0 of its Lotus Symphony suite today, which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics producer. Like OpenOffice but unlike the others, Symphony is free now and will apparently remain free -- at least that's IBM's current stance -- and is available in an impressive 28 languages.

Perhaps more importantly from an historical standpoint, Symphony represents Lotus' first completely new commercial spreadsheet product in a decade -- specifically, since 1-2-3 Millennium Edition in 1998.

BetaNews is as anxious to test Symphony 1.0 as everyone else. Apparently, everyone else is working anxiously to download the 192 MB version for Windows XP or Vista, or the similarly sized package for SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. As of 3:15 pm EDT this afternoon, IBM's servers remained quite clogged from our vantage point.

We can say that IBM's current version of its Download Manager for Symphony requires you to upgrade to the latest build of the Java platform, although Symphony itself is not a Java application. Once we get things up and running, we'll let you know what we find.