IBM tackles Microsoft on all fronts
Published: 21 Sep 2007 13:59 BST
IBM is tackling Microsoft on several fronts, including office productivity, email clients and groupware.
This week the company re-launched Lotus Symphony, which was a serious competitor to Microsoft Office, dating back to before IBM's purchase of Lotus. This time around, Symphony is based on the open-source OpenOffice software — and IBM has joined the OpenOffice movement with a promise to contribute software.
Symphony is integrated with Lotus Notes, IBM's long-running groupware product which is to be distributed in its physical form on Friday. The product is popular with large organisations, and has been increasing its market share, although analysts don't expect it to overtake Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange products.
The company also plans to give Microsoft a run for its money in unified communications. While Microsoft is gearing up for the launch of Office Communications Server, and building in telephony and IM into its Outlook client, IBM is planning to do much the same thing, through a partnership with Siemens that will bring more communications methods into Lotus Sametime.
Lotus Symphony: a first look
Although it's still in beta testing, IBM's Lotus Symphony offers strong alternatives to Word, PowerPoint and Excel with more features and nicer interfaces than most other free software. [24 Sep 2007]
Analyst: Lotus Notes 8 no threat to Outlook
Industry observers have noted Lotus Notes' new and improved features but doubt it will succeed in luring Outlook users from Microsoft [21 Sep 2007]
Rivals take aim at Microsoft Office
Google, Yahoo and IBM all seem to think the multi-billion-dollar cash cow is at last vulnerable to alternatives [19 Sep 2007]
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community
The company will contribute code from the development of its Lotus Notes software, providing a boost for the ODF standard [10 Sep 2007]
IBM follows Microsoft with unified comms push
Siemens technology is to be built into IBM's Lotus Sametime software to enable integrated telephony and presence features [24 Aug 2007]
Lotus Notes 8 due for Friday release
IBM is to release an Eclipse-based version of Lotus Notes and Domino by the end of the week, boasting a range of improvements [15 Aug 2007]
Did you find this article useful?
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
