A few months ago I was one of the lucky ITS @ IBM to get a laptop refresh.  I was so very excited, even though it always takes sometime to upgrade, transfer all your files, install all your plugins, and to customize the machine to fit my person demo preferences and make sure I have all the bells and whistles to show my customers what IBM Lotus has to offer.  It was great to get hardware refresh.

I was so very surprised to see one piece that I was not expecting.  The laptop was shipped to me without MS Office on the desktop.  I had Lotus Notes 8.5 of course, Sametime, Connections plugins and SYMPHONY.

So here is my thoughts after the first 90 days without MS Office.

The first thing that I thought was… ok… now I can really cut the cord and use Symphony only.  I had been using it for over a year… but not exclusively.  IBM has been offering all of our templates, forms and presentations in the Symphony formats, but I was still using the Office Suite.  Well really it was the default on my old laptop.  But I do have to say that I have been using MS Office since it’s inception, so it is hard to make a complete cut over without taking some action.

To be honest… I am enjoying this much more.  The fact that when I do a file save, my machine does not freeze, most of the capabilities are not that different, in presentations I can add animation, manage groups, combine objects, add text effects, so many things that you can do in Powerpoint.  My favorite thing is the ease of use (more logical in my opinion) for the Masters – Slides, Notes and Handouts and controlling the Page Layouts.  I tend to use presentations the most, but really there are great things about the Document and the Spreadsheet tools as well.  Really tables are so much easier, formating is easier too… no pesky hidden code to make you mad and hard to control.

It is also so very easy to save documents into Office formats to share with my customers, and to easily export in one click to PDF / HTML format.

Here is the point:  I am just one person and with little to no effort this upgrade saved IBM $350.  You can do the math for your own organization and see how much money you can save.

I am really happy… and I have not looked back once!  Give it a try yourself for free… BE FREE AND WORK SMART!!