OStatic

In one of the largest enterprise-mandated migrations away from Microsoft's Office suite ever, Linux Magazine and German sources report that 360,000 IBM workers have been ordered to switch from Office to IBM's own Lotus Symphony suite. Symphony isn't open source, but it is free, and is deeply rooted in open source, originally based on OpenOffice code. Apparently, the employees have only ten days to switch, and Open Document Format (ODF) will become the standard file format at IBM, replacing .doc files. The German economic newspaper Handelsblatt also reports that 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony.

IBM announced today that its free office productivity software suite Lotus Symphony will be finalized in a version for the Macintosh later this month. The move will bring more competition for Microsoft Office on the Mac, and it will also represent strong competition for OpenOffice 3.0, which, as we covered here, was a big boost for Mac users of OpenOffice because version 3.0 is a true Aqua application. In addition to being optimized for Aqua in its Mac version, Symphony shares code and history with OpenOffice. Here are the details.