Lotus Symphony, IBM's new, free office productivity software, has been downloaded by more than 100,000 registered business and consumer users in its first week, a company press release said. 

 
Lotus Symphony is fully integrated into Lotus Notes 8, providing users with easy access to productivity tools without having to launch a separate application. Symphony desktop offerings are part of the broader technology trend of enabling faster, more automated movement of information within and between organizations using the Open Document Format. ODF makes digital information independent of the program from which it was created -- such as a word processor, spreadsheet or presentation software. This makes documents universally accessible on any platform.
 
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. For example, members have assisted each other with installation and usage questions, and individual users are responding to each other. Between IBM's support team responding and the community response, answers to user questions and usage suggestions are happening in near real time.  In fact, support forum posts have accelerated from under one hundred the first day to more than 600 daily. Community members are also providing feedback on capabilities they want to see in future releases, IBM said.
 
The company plans to add a number of new community features such as member voting to the Symphony website in the near future. This is part of IBM's stated objective of allowing Symphony users to help drive product development priorities for upcoming releases. The Symphony website has already undergone a design change based on user feedback.
 
"There is an evolution taking place in the way documents are being used for collaboration,"  Chetan Yardi, Country Manager, Lotus, IBM India/South Asia, said. "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."
 
Lotus Symphony is comprised of three core applications: Lotus Symphony Documents word processor, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. The software, which supports Windows and Linux desktops, is designed to handle the majority of office productivity tasks that workers typically perform. Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats, including Microsoft Office and Open Document Format (ODF), and also can output content in PDF format.
 
IBM is working with the ODF standard to bring new capabilities to documents, enabling them to interact with business information such as ERP and SCM 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. This will lead to a broader range of solutions and ODF-supported applications that draw from the OpenOffice.org technology.

What IBM left unstated was that Lotus Symphony is widely expected to present the first real challenge to Microsoft’s Office suite and its proprietary document formats.