After last week IBM announced it has joined the OpenOffice project today the company has showed the first sign of things to come.

Last Friday, Adam Jollans, open source strategy manager for IBM, explained IBM decided to join OpenOffice community now because of the recent acceleration in uptake of the Open Document Format (ODF) as the open file format of choice among governments. ODF is developed by an IBM-led consortium and standardized by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization or ISO.

Today IBM has made another important announcement and unveiled IBM Lotus Symphony, a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

"IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. "The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways."

The suite, which is available at www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony, can be downloaded by anyone (from business users to consumer users) and is based on the same tools used in Lotus Notes 8.

According to IBM Lotus Symphony contains three core applications Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations.

As IBM noted, because it’s based Lotus Symphony allows organizations to access, use and maintain all their documents for the long-term, without worrying about ongoing software licensing and royalty fees, an aspect very important especially for governments.

The Symphony suite is available in a Beta 1 version and currently supports Windows (XP, Vista) and Linux (Suse Enterprise, Red Hat 5) operating systems, is able to handle multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and Open Document Format (ODF), and also can output content in PDF format.

Still as IBM warned in its FAQ 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 the documents opening or saving encrypted in Microsoft Office it’s impossible in Lotus Symphony because the two suites use different algorithms for document encryption and decryption.

IBM’s decision to release IBM Lotus Symphony could be a major challenge to Microsoft’s dominance in the office suites market and for its latest product, Microsoft Office 2007.

Microsoft Office 2007, which was launched earlier this year, is a radically improved product. For example Office 2007 comes with a new design that more prominently shows the commands a user is likely to need.

In fact, along with Windows, the Office suite is one the main sources of revenues for the Redmond company.

Earlier this year Microsoft announced the financial results for the fourth fiscal quarter and said that the sales in the client division, which is dominated by Windows Vista and Office 2007, rose 14 per cent to 3.81 billion dollars, compared to 3.35 billion dollars a year ago.

But earlier this month, as we reported, Microsoft suffered a major setback as the company failed to get its Office Open XML format, on which is based Office 2007, certified as ISO standards.

Still Microsoft doesn’t seem very concerned about IBM’s announcement. In a statement quoted by ComputerWorld, Jacob Jaffe, Microsoft's Office director, said that the company it has no plans to lower its Office 2007 prices in response to the release of Lotus Symphony.