IBM Lotus Symphony is a set of applications for creating, editing, and sharing word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Designed to handle the majority of tasks that end users perform, the Lotus Symphony tools support the Open Document Format (ODF), enabling organizations to access, use, and maintain their documents over the long term without worrying about end-of-life uncertainties or ongoing software licensing and royalty fees. By using tools that support ODF, customers are not locked into one particular vendor for their productivity tools. ODF helps provide interoperability and flexibility.

With Lotus Symphony, end users create, manage, edit, and import documents in ODF. However, Lotus Symphony tools can also import, edit, and save documents in Microsoft Office formats or export those documents to ODF for sharing with ODF-compliant applications and solutions.
There are three applications that make up the Lotus Symphony tools: Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, and Lotus Symphony Presentations. These applications offer a complete set of features and can serve as an end user's daily office productivity solution. For many customers and organizations, the Lotus Symphony tools are a viable alternative to purchasing, deploying, and managing typical vendor-proprietary productivity suites.