Yes folks, not just released… it’s unleashed (according to the press release). The question is a simple one – which organisation in today’s economic climate would ignore “the chance to save hundreds of dollars on each of their Microsoft Office licenses by providing support for Microsoft Office 2007 with the newest version of Lotus Symphony, IBM’s free of charge productivity software suite”? Maybe not today, maybe not next week or next month… maybe the decision is a year away. The important thing is that there’s a choice. By the way, if you’re a Notes customer, the cost of support is built in.

Symphony 1.3 boasts a number of enhancements – ‘DataPilot’ tables (they’re called something else in Excel and include the word ‘pivot’) for analysing data, some new animation effects for presentations, and widget and live text support (just like Notes 8). Personally I think the new DataPilot tables are the highlight, and they’re easier to use and change than the Excel equivalent. The image here shows the context-sensitive configuration panel which allows you to simply drag and drop the fields to table pages, columns and rows in order to change the way you can visualise your data.

I was also very pleased that I was able to provide the PR team with two customer references for the press release – and there was one more we could have used but it was decided to save that one for another occasion. So, we have information about the plans of leading UK retailer John Lewis Partnership and international property business Cluttons. Note that Mark from Cluttons says “we plan to use the cost saving to further invest in Lotus productivity tool sets”.

I’ve heard people talk about the Microsoft Office ‘tax’ stifling innovation – how true is that? I think Mark’s quote puts the ‘tax’ thought into context – Cluttons are going to use the money they save to implement new capabilities which will help their business… they’re increasing their available functionality with a move to Symphony.