Beijing (China) – IBM today unveiled the latest version of its office productivity suite Symphony, which is now available as a beta for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system and as a final product for Canonical’s Ubuntu 8.0.4 Linux distribution.  IBM also announced that future versions of Symphony will be developed entirely on the ODF 1.2 and OpenOffice 3.0 software code base.

Symphony 1.2 beta, which has been available since mid-September, was released earlier today with additional support for Mac OS X for the first time. The beta phase is scheduled to last several months with general availability planned for Q1 2009. IBM also took the Ubuntu version out of beta today and released the final version of Symphony 1.2 for Ubuntu Linux 8.0.4. In addition to Mac support, the software received enhancements to the Data Pilot support in the spreadsheet tool, IBM said.

The Mac and Linux news were part of a more extensive announcement at the OpenOffice.org (OO) Conference, at which IBM promised a long-term commitment to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and a roadmap for the expansion of office application suite to Macintosh, Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice 3.0 and Microsoft Office users.

IBM said that future generations of Symphony will be developed on the ODF 1.2 and OpenOffice 3.0 software code base, aligning it with the Open Office platform. According to the company, this strategy will deliver “seamless interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007 file formats and support Visual Basic macros next year.” By bringing the code base in line with OpenOffice 3.0 code, IBM hopes that there will be more developer contributions that will impact the direction of the software. IBM alone plans to deliver more than 60 new features to Symphony in 2009. The software will continue to be offered free of charge.

IBM said that Symphony has been downloaded more than three million times so far.