With Microsoft poised to unleash its next collaboration and unified communication (UC) suite next week, rival IBM is launching a preemptive strike by promising a tight level of integration between its own UC platform and its new, free Lotus Symphony productivity suite.

The company plans to ship Ubuntu and Red Hat versions of its "Open Collaboration Client," a combination of Lotus Notes 8 and Symphony. IBM has increased support for Linux with the introduction of versions of its Lotus Notes collaboration suite and Symphony productivity tools built to run on the open source OS -- and it's hoping the effort will help unseat Microsoft as the king of desktop software.

IBM Tuesday released the second beta of its free Lotus Symphony productivity applications suite and says a final version will ship next year designed to drive adoption of open file formats.

IBM calls its new office productivity suite, built upon OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony. This disappoints two groups. The first group, fans like me of OpenOffice, wish it kept the OpenOffice name to help further the open cause. The second group wishes the old Lotus Symphony office suite, an early competitor to Microsoft Office, had climbed out of the grave.

Last month, just one week after IBM announced it would help with OpenOffice.org's development, the company released Lotus Symphony, an office suite based on OpenOffice.org code. I found a lot of slick features in Lotus Symphony, but I worry that Symphony could affect the OpenOffice.org community adversely.

Expanding its efforts to offer an alternative to Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)'s Office desktop applications, IBM (NYSE:IBM) is making its free Lotus Symphony office productivity suite available for Apple (NSDQ:AAPL)'s Mac OS X and Canonical's Ubuntu Linux.

Is IBM gearing up to disrupt Microsoft Office? Apparently so. In fact, Big Blue is bringing Lotus Symphony 1.2 — an open source application suite — to the Mac.

Not so long ago, IBM teamed up with Canonical to create an application which contains an office suite featuring word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications based on IBM Lotus Symphony, an e-mail client that is based on IBM Lotus Notes, the social networking and collaboration cloud-based tools provided by LotusLive.com and the underlying Ubuntu operating system.

At the beginning of the year I wrote about IBM Lotus Symphony Beta 3, IBM's closed source OpenOffice-based free office suite. Now the final release, Lotus Symphony 1 is out. I wasn't impressed last time, but I installed the final release on Ubuntu 8.04 to test it out.