Released Thursday, the beta is the first version of Symphony that is based on OpenOffice 3.x. Users have been asking the company to make Symphony's features more competitive with Microsoft Office, the dominant productivity suite among corporate users.

Lotus claims more than of Symphony, which is available in 28 languages.

"The OpenOffice 3 code means we pick up a lot of improvements both from the ODF file format as well as the core code base," says Jeanette Barlow, manager of Lotus Symphony. She says it is the most significant step forward since the first Symphony beta was released in 2007.

IBM/Lotus, along with many others, is trying to provide to Microsoft Office, which has dominated for years. With companies segmenting their user base and assessing needs, many are looking at less expensive alternatives to Office.