Datamation magazine released the winners in their Product of the Year contest for 2008 and Lotus Symphony won in the Office Productivity Software category. In this category, Lotus Symphony beat out other nominees Microsoft Office, OpenOffice 2.3.1 and Think Free Office. Read the complete article here http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/cnews/article.php

Lotus Symphony Background Info
IBM Lotus Symphony is a set of productivity tools that are provided at no charge. The following applications make up Lotus Symphony:

- Lotus Symphony Documents,

- Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets,

- Lotus Symphony Presentations.

Lotus Symphony helps controlling the spiraling upgrade costs while ensuring access to documents well into the future with new standard file formats (ODF), get more from your current investments. Lotus Symphony can be downloaded from here http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/products

Lotus Symphony for Lotus Notes Users

Lotus Notes 8 software includes an integrated version of Lotus Symphony. It is possible to create, edit, and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations without ever leaving the familiar Lotus Notes user interface.

By providing support for OpenDocument Format (ODF), importing and editing Microsoft® Office documents and exporting them to ODF for sharing with ODF-compliant applications and solutions is possible.

Besides this Lotus Symphony applications could be accessed from within the Lotus Notes 8 tabbed user interface. Also clicking and sending documents via email from within the individual Lotus Symphony applications and exporting content to Adobe® PDF format is possible.