Lotus to throw weight behind Apple

Symphony and Notes supplement Mac and iPhone

Apple’s hardware revival is prompting IBM to add support for the Mac and iPhone.

According to an Associated Press article, IBM’s Lotus subsidiary will next week announce that support for the iPhone will be added to its Notes email/groupware line. Expected to come at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida, the endorsement of a leading business communications brand is significant but users will need to have Lotus’s Domino server software installed at their organisations.

Just as important, Lotus also plans to release a version of its free Symphony productivity suite for Macs, according to the report. Based on OpenOffice.org code, Symphony was released for Windows and Linux last September.

As on Windows, Microsoft Office is well entrenched on the Mac but having a free suite option is likely to attract many users. A significant uptake could also have an effect on the tussle between Microsoft and rivals over file formats as Symphony supports the ODF format that competes against the Microsoft-backed Office Open XML.