In case you thought Google was going to have all the fun in trying to draw users away from Microsoft Office, IBM has decided to jump into the fray by offering up its own free set of office productivity tools.

IBM Lotus Symphony was launched along side of Google Presently (the presentation tools discussed in the story below) and is based on the Open Office code base.  The suite comes with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application.  This marks the fourth major entry into the office productivity market in recent years attempting to break the hold Microsoft Office has on the industry.

This also marks yet another major suite to come out that supports the Open Document Format in competition to Microsoft's proprietary document formats.