Becoming A Writer Seriously

Early Alert: New FREE Productivity Suite

Published by Tom Colvin on September 22, 2007 03:49 am under 6-Alternative Office Suites, 4-Alternatives to Word, Uncategorized

IBM this week has unveiled a new productivity suite aimed as a replacement for Microsoft Office — and it’s free.Â Lotus Symphony offers three major components:Â Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets, directly challenging Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel.Â The software is currently undergoing beta testing — and bugs are being reported — but it will certainly go public fairly soon.

For writers who already own Microsoft Office, this new contender will likely be of little interest.Â In fact, it appears to be more a challenger to OpenOffice and the emerging online suites such as Zoho and ThinkFree than to Microsoft’s dominate office suite.Â However, younger writers on a tight budget may find Lotus Symphony to be their productivity suite of choice.

Fellow old-timers may be confused by IBM’s choice of title for this software.Â Lotus, back in the 90’s, had another suite called Symphony, but apparently the new IBM offering is not a legacy software, but a full-fledged new contender.Â I myself also remember Lotus Smart Suite, which I actually used for quite some time until I bit the bullet and paid the full fee for Office.

For a full review of the new software, take a look at CNET’s review.Â CNET reviews are, in my view, among the most authoritative, and this one is as good as ever.Â Do be cautioned, however, that the review headline is misleading, suggesting this software runs only on the Linux operating system.Â It runs also on Windows XP and Vista.

2 Comments so far

Marge on September 25th, 2007

I’m writing a book and would like to share some of my own experience. I was fortunate to attract a small team that helps me with the manuscript and marketing. I am collaborating with an administrative group of 4 -5 people. However, it was extremely difficult to track our progress at first. It took a great deal of communication and time to follow up on assignments etc. Then my administrator and my manuscript leader found Wrike.com http://www.wrike.com/ and presented it to me. It seemed too good to be true to find an online service this good for such little money. This system allowed me to track who was on which assignment and what progress was being made. What a difference that made in my life! I was now able to have a work spread sheet. Our team is now able to see our progress and book momentum. By the way I like the fact that I can communicate with the Wrike team, they are very helpful. I highly recommend Wrike to every writer. Even if you are not supported by a group of people, Wrike will organize your personal activity and youâ€™ll definitely see the results.
Tom Colvin on September 27th, 2007

Thanks for the reference to the project management website www.wrike.com. I’ve taken a look and tracked down some reviews of this new facility, which only recently was opened to the public. I can see how this facility would be useful to writers, especially when they reach the editing, production and marketing stage when other people become directly involved. I especially like its simplicity, with email as the automatic trigger to update and maintain a schedule. I’ve added this facility to my very long list of tools for further exploration — I may well do a fuller review on this blog later on.