Microsoft’s Office suite will, typically, account for a large chunk of the small business IT budget, but there aren’t that many alternatives.

Openoffice.org is one with, as an open source application, clear benefits when it comes to cost. And now there’s another from IBM, called Lotus Symphony, which is, similarly, an open source application and available for free download.

Not to be confused with the 1980s Lotus Symphony spreadsheet program, what you get this time round are the word processing, spreadsheet and presentation graphics editors from IBM’s Lotus Notes email and collaboration product. These it claims to have ported to run on either Windows or Linux desktops, using its Eclipse open source framework.

In reality, what the developers appear to have done is take an old fork of Open Office and use it as an engine to provide the necessary functionality behind a Notes-like interface. That’s all fine in theory but, in practice, we found it far from perfect.

The first thing you discover is that the software is only available as a beta ­ and beta 1 at that. That’s something IBM fails to mention in a lot of the marketing material. It’s also a fairly hefty download, with 133MB required for the Windows XP/Vista implementation and 213MB for Linux. Installation is pretty straightforward but, likewise, a fairly lengthy process.

What you end up with are three separate applications ­ Lotus Symphony Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, which load themselves into a common graphical workspace. For non-Notes users the interface can take a while to get used to but it isn’t that hard to master and, although nowhere near as comprehensive as Office, you do get most of the functionality you’d expect from each of these applications. You also get a few extras, such as being able to export documents to PDF.

Another claimed advantage is the ability to save documents in the Open Document Format (ODF), although this only applies when sharing documents with other applications also able to support it. Microsoft Office isn’t one of those and although Lotus Symphony can read and write a number of other formats, the list is very short and there’s no support for the latest Office 2007 specifications, nor the ability to save to HTML.

We also found the product sluggish. Even when installed on a dual-core notebook PC with plenty of Ram it took almost a minute for the main workspace window to open, followed by further delays whenever a new tool was used for the first time.

On the plus side, you can use the same applications and share documents on Windows and Linux platforms. However, Openoffice.org can also do this, and it supports more Linux implementations, along with Sun’s Solaris and the Apple Mac platform. You also get more than just a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics, particularly in the latest version 2.3, which is now a very useable product.

It’s not clear exactly what IBM hopes to achieve with Lotus Symphony, especially as it is also backing the Openoffice.org project. Notes customers may get something out of it and will find they get the software included as part of the next update. For non-Notes customers, however, especially small businesses, it seems to offer little that can’t be had from Openoffice.org and, based on our experiences, looks unlikely to challenge Microsoft’s market domination.