Interesting announcements from IBM’s Michael Karasick at the OpenOffice conference in China, brought to us by Ed Brill:
* Over 3 million downloads of Lotus Symphony — 2 million of which have come since 1.0 release in May, 2008
* Symphony 1.2, with key new features such as data pilot tables (aka pivot tables), is now available on Windows and Linux (including Ubuntu Linux), and the first Mac beta available
* IBM plans to deliver 60 new features in Symphony updates in 2009, including Visual Basic macro support, and Office 2007 file format support. These new releases will be developed with ODF (Open Document Format) 1.2 support and will begin use of the OpenOffice 3.0 code base
* IBM and Sun have joined together to create the ODF Toolkit Union, at odftoolkit.org. This site will help a broader range of ISVs build solutions that leverage ODF
* IBM is announcing a dozen customer references for Lotus Symphony, from all over the world. I will link to the list when it is available online on Wednesday US time
I love the idea of the Visual Basic macro support (a number of my customers have asked for this in both Symphony and the Notes client), and think that the 3m downloads is a significant threshold to have reached. Excellent news.