While the Open Document Format (ODF) keeps gaining more and more momentum, IBM has released Beta 3 of its Eclipse-based OpenOffice.org hybrid Lotus Symphony. I did some initial testing with Beta 1 back in September. Let's see what has changed during the last three months.

The good news is that the installer of Beta 3 is able to upgrade an existing installation. So no more uninstall/reinstall is needed. The whole program also feels a lot snappier. I guess they have been working on performance quite a bit. Additionally the user interface has been translated into more than 20 languages (including Dutch). Nice.

The bad news is that there is still no decent information for developers. The only page that mentions developers is the existing marketing blurp but there is no new information on it. (Note the typo in the page title: "IBM Louts Symphony". No pun intended, I guess ;)

There will be a Lotus Symphony Developer day during (or alongside) Lotusphere 2008 in January, but the announcement of that session is so vague that one can wonder how technical that event will be: "Lotus Symphony can fit into your enterprise IT solutions to streamline information processing in transactional, collaborative and intelligence systems".

I guess we'll have to wait some more to find out how to create (Eclipse) plug-ins that extend the functionality of Lotus Symphony.