IBM released today the second version of its free office suite, Lotus Symphony Beta 2. The first beta of Lotus Symphony, a suite which includes three core applications (Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations) is available for download since September 18 and has separate Windows and Linux installers.

Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats, including Microsoft Office and Open Document Format (ODF), and also can output content in PDF format.

According to IBM the office suite has been downloaded by more than one-quarter million registered users - 88 percent of which are Microsoft customers - in its first two months.

Also IBM introduced several modifications as a response to a range of customer requests. For example, in response to user requests for quicker and easier installation, IBM has accelerated the Symphony download process by 100 percent. Now users have an instant, one-click installation that produces a single Symphony icon for all three document editors. Clicking on the single icon allows the user to opt for a word-processing document, a spreadsheet or a presentation file.

IBM explained performance was another area of user interest. The IBM technical team quickly identified areas in the code that could be optimized and tuned. As a result, in the new beta, overall performance of Lotus Symphony has improved and some functions such as opening existing presentations run, on average, 50 percent faster. Symphony Beta 2 was developed in less than eight weeks.

Still Lotus Symphony can’t open all Microsoft documents. Some advanced features such as embedded macros are not supported and there may be other conversion issues. Also the macros created in Lotus Symphony are not exportable to Microsoft Office.

Also opening or saving the documents encrypted in Microsoft Office it’s impossible in Lotus Symphony because the two suites use different algorithms for document encryption and decryption.