The company plans to ship Ubuntu and Red Hat versions of its "Open Collaboration Client," a combination of Lotus Notes 8 and Symphony. IBM has increased support for Linux with the introduction of versions of its Lotus Notes collaboration suite and Symphony productivity tools built to run on the open source OS -- and it's hoping the effort will help unseat Microsoft as the king of desktop software.

IBM believes Linux is finally ready for the corporate desktop as it declares that it will provide full support for Ubuntu Linux with Lotus Notes 8.5 and Lotus Symphony using its Open Collaboration Client software. Some believe this could be the death of Ubuntu...

IBM and Novell have announced an integrated open collaboration client for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop that includes IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM productivity tools to deliver advanced email and calendar capabilities, unified communication & collaboration and lightweight yet powerful word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation capabilities with OpenDocument Format support.

IBM Tuesday released the second beta of its free Lotus Symphony productivity applications suite and says a final version will ship next year designed to drive adoption of open file formats.

Last month, just one week after IBM announced it would help with OpenOffice.org's development, the company released Lotus Symphony, an office suite based on OpenOffice.org code. I found a lot of slick features in Lotus Symphony, but I worry that Symphony could affect the OpenOffice.org community adversely.

At the beginning of the year I wrote about IBM Lotus Symphony Beta 3, IBM's closed source OpenOffice-based free office suite. Now the final release, Lotus Symphony 1 is out. I wasn't impressed last time, but I installed the final release on Ubuntu 8.04 to test it out.

Despite an upsurge in open-source and hosted competitors, IBM's Lotus Notes corporate e-mail client software and Domino e-mail server is expected to maintain its second banana status behind Microsoft Outlook and Exchange through at least 2011.

The latest Ubuntu distribution of Linux will support an entire new Lotus office productivity suite from IBM. Red Hat said it will support part of the suite: Notes and Lotus' upcoming Symphony, which is still in beta.

IBM calls its new office productivity suite, built upon OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony. This disappoints two groups. The first group, fans like me of OpenOffice, wish it kept the OpenOffice name to help further the open cause. The second group wishes the old Lotus Symphony office suite, an early competitor to Microsoft Office, had climbed out of the grave.