Category: IBM

You may not have heard of Lotus Symphony before -- IBM's OpenOffice remix doesn't grab too many headlines. It is, however, a very capable alternative to Oracle's free offering and Microsoft Office. Recently, IBM announced the release of Symphony version 3, and the new release is packed with useful updates. One of the most noticeable changes is the new menu sidebars, which are an excellent ...

It is with dubiously raised eyebrows that we bring you this gem: using accelerometers in hard disks to detect seismic activity, IBM can divine a wealth of natural disaster-related information. These hard disk sensors are so sensitive that they can detect the tiniest of vibrations. The seismic data, along with the sensor's geographical location, are then sent to a mainframe computer to be ...

There's word today today that IBM has finally ordered its staff to abandon Microsoft Office immediately and switch to their own Lotus Symphony suite. Symphony has been around since 2008, and apparently IBM is now confident enough in its office work kung fu that it's going to take over full time duties. The move makes perfect sense. It's hard to imagine any company using someone else's software to ...

If your company uses Lotus Notes, and has been considering switching to Google Apps, you're in luck. Google has just launched an easy migration tool that allows you to bring all of your Notes data over to the equivalent Google Apps. In a blog post, Google explains that the migration tool is simple and complete enough for enterprise use, and that a 30,000-person company has already used it to ...

You may not have read much about Lotus Symphony - OpenOffice.Org casts a pretty big shadow over other free Office competitors. Like OpenOffice, IBM's cross-platform office suite is based on the Open Document format and is a very capable alternative to Micorosoft Office. Symphony doesn't provide the same number of tools as Office or OpenOffice, but it does handle word processing, spreadsheet, and ...

In our last installment the XForce was busy keeping you safe on the Internet. In this episode it's XForce versus the evil spam. Spam, as we all know, is a pain in the rear. The XForce report covers a lot of ground on spam and phishing. Some of the things the report covers (that I won't): What happened to image-based spam? How much spam is phishing? How much spam is PDF spam? Where are ...

The XForce won't save you from a burning building but, they just might make your surfing safer. The XForce is IBM's team of Internet Security Systems researchers and they've just released the midyear report for 2008, listing all kinds of facts and figures on internet security. If you're really into data, go read the report for yourself. It might also be good for insomnia. I'll give you the quick ...

IBM has put the finishing touches on Lotus Symphony, a free Microsoft Office competitor based on OpenOffice.org. The company pushed out version 1.0 of the office suite which has been available as a public beta since last year. Unlike OpenOffice.org, Lotus Symphony is not open source software. While IBM is providing it for free, Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, which is the last ...

Remember Lotus Symphony? A few months ago IBM launched its open source MS Office competitor based on OpenOffice.org code. We downloaded it, installed it, weren't particularly impressed, unloaded it and forgot about it. Now IBM is back with a second beta release of Lotus Symphony. The application still runs pretty slow on our Windows Vista test system. There are versions available for Windows XP, ...

One of the main complaints we're hearing from readers about IBM's new office suite is that you have to register in order to download it. IBM released Lotus Symphony yesterday. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet application and PowerPoint clone. It's built on OpenOffice.org, but it has a look and feel all its own. And it's free, but you have to give away a lot of personal ...

A week after IBM announced that it would join the OpenOffice.org developer community, the company has launched its own standalone office application suite. Like OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, and presentation software. That shouldn't be surprising, as the software was developed using technology from the open source OpenOffice.org. Lotus ...

IBM has announced that it is joining the OpenOffice.org community. The company will contribute code already developed for Lotus Notes and will assist development in an ongoing basis. From a user perspective, there's no word on what tangible changes we'll see in OpenOffice.org in the near future. But open source development has never been a case of "too many cooks spoil the broth," so we're going ...

Google has acquired a company that makes high resolution cameras for capturing aerial images. ImageAmerica supplied Google with up to date images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The move will allow Google to update the imagery in Google Maps and Google Earth. No word on how much Google paid for this latest acquisition or how long we'll have to wait before we see the new images start to ...

Hospitals are willing to upgrade systems and spend revenue on software applications and Big Blue is never too shy to come to the rescue. Mid-size hospitals in India are now seeing new IT initiatives as a way to gain a competitive advantage against the larger more well known facilities. It's suggested that there was a $300 million untapped hospital service market available for the taking when IBM ...

IBM is working on a new web browser designed for blind and visually impaired users. For now, the program bears the obvious codename of "Accessibility Browser," or A-Browser for short. You'd think that all the new multimedia content on the web would make the internet more useful for the blind. But it turns out that programs designed to read web pages usually don't know how to deal with audio and ...