Ed Brill

"May you live in interesting times ..."

I love it when that quote feels like it is talking about the 'right now'

Interesting that IBM decided to enter this space again. I think this is a great move ... and I hope this pushes IBM to introduce new features like WordPerfect filters and more.

This is great news, Ed, although not really a surprise after last week's move, as you indicate. (I get an error on the link to the press release though)

Greate News!

I wonder Mac users will wait a little bit further down the line.

Outstanding. Great news. And I love seeing IBM Lotus include the consumer market as a target audience.

Oh, and nice name. :D

Ed,

Any chance Lotus will go after Google Apps with Symphony? I would love to see Lotus deliver a web based, multi-user editable office suite.

Ed, the download links say "Beta 1". Your announcement makes no reference to them being Beta, and neither do the two stories to which you've linked. So, is Symphony a Beta or not?

Also, are Symphony and the Notes 8 Editors going to be always kept in sync? If not, you're going to have people installing one over the other, which could get a bit messy.

Cheers,

- Mike

Congrats! Great Move!

btw, I'm older enough to rember the other Lotus Symphony: { Link }

(someone have to update that wiki page)

Great to see this, particularly in light of last week's announcement.

@6: Ed did mention it's beta:

"What about support? Initially, this stand-alone offering is being delivered as a beta..."

Wonderful!!

I guess IBM would release also a spanish language pack or similar... would it ?

Also, I hope IBM would "push" this suite on business, institutions, etc... OpenOffice was not sucessfull as expected to be deployed on business, and I guess that it was because it was not "pushed" actively by sun.... IBM is already introduced on big business, governemts, etc.. Would it push the software everywhere ?

What about pushing on Linux distributons as SUSE, RedHAT, ubuntu as well ? Would not have OpenOffice as a competitor there ? How would it fit IBM both helping OpenOffice while trying to focus on their own product distribution ?

Good news. Nice site too, far preferable to the mainstream ibm.com look ;o) Akihiko, this is what the page says about OS X:

"The tools work with computers running both Microsoft Windows and Linux- environments, with support for Apple Macintosh planned for the future."

These new Rich Text editors appear to use Open Document Formats as their first class citizen (?) rich text format.

Can this some way be interpreted as Lotus Rich Text 2.0. ?

Are there plans to provide converters between Lotus Rich Text and those newer formats?

As a big believer in software entropy I can fully understand the need for a second format after more than 10 years.

Or am I totally on the wrong track, babbling pointless issue which may aditionally create confusion?

Hi Ed, I wonder whether a blog will be running from the product team for Symphony? Many people will be thinking about what to do with their incumbent office products come the next upgrade cycle. If a blog got off the ground I'd like to learn more about how Symphony integrates with QuickR for publishing information directly etc. Thanks, Stu

@8 So, he did. Apologies, Ed.

Cheers,

- Mike

Hi ED

Coud you explain IBM new strategy Symphony was replaced by Lotus SmartSuite.

Now you have Symphony again. How it si relater to SmartSuite?

Hi Ed,

Can you already give some outlook/timetable of the future development of Symphony and the integrated editors in Notes 8 ?

As I experienced some trouble with ODF-Files from OpenOffice in Symphony/Notes 8 Productivity Editors, I am very interested in the next steps regarding compatibility to ODF... . Is there any public information available yet ?

As an aside, who else besides me has smiled at the subdomain naming ...

symphony.lotus.com

?

:-)

{ Link }

Love the site and look and feel. Is this a new look Lotus?

@16 Made me laugh too ;-) We're getting there!

@16: sym@phony.lotus.com would be even funnier. But Lotus is for real these days I'm glad to say.

Very cool, a Notes client without the Notes bit. Are the Productivity editors now going to be referred to as Symphony when they appear in the Notes 8 client?

Recycling product names now, are we ?:-)

@20 - Aye. Saving the planet!

Glad to see that I am not the only one to remember a previous Symphony. LOL!

It may be a recycled name, but what a good one... Just be pleased they didnt recycle SmartSuite ;-)

This is posted in full at { Link }

"Athens, GA (Sept 18, 2007) - The war between IBM. Microsoft and Google for control of the user desktop is escalating. Last week, Microsoft made a bold move in reducing the academic pricing of the full version of Microsoft Office to US$60 for students. It could be that this may have actually been a preemptive move. At the IBM Lotus Collaboration Summit in New York City today, IBM announced the immediate availability of Lotus Symphony. Unlike the old Lotus spreadsheet product of the same name, this product is a comprehensive suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations..."

Great news.

Is Lotus Symphony based on OpenOffice? If so, how is it different? Is it open source?

I'm not sure what you mean by "you can logically see where this is going.". I thought I was pretty logical but I'm not that too informed on the relationship between Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice or IBM and OpenOffice, so I'm confused. I would love to have choices of multiple products using one open document standard. This looks like a step towards having that but I'm not sure exactly what it is.

Good News! But where is the Mac OSX-Version??

@7 You're not alone.

@20 Apparently. Lotus might have picked another name that wasn't on this list though:{ Link }

Someone needs to update Wikipedia now: { Link }

@23 they can't recycle SmartSuite as it's still sold. If this things get's close to 25% of the SmartSuite licenses shipped I will be impressed.

Well, it's certainly a better product name than that CapGemini - Google thing!

@27 - If Dvorak hates it, that's a good enough endorsement for me!

I'm interested in the reasons for the delay in the Mac version. This time Eclipse cannot be blamed (I assume)...

@31 - Since these are still sitting on top of Eclipse, I imagine that is exactly the reason.

From my pov the interesting point would be the collaborative capabilities of this open office integration. Found this allways a weak point of MS Office, which gets way stronger with Sharepoint.

A business Expert creates a master spreadsheet with OpenOffice Calc containing all the formulas.

User processes can get threadsafe access to "their" instance of the master spreadsheet (this was a problem with MS Office).

The resulting data of the user processes is saved on the server.

Such integrations with colaborative features could turn the whole thing in something way bigger than a nicer looking SmartSuite_2008 with less bugs.

Deleted - anonymous comments not allowed

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obServer - It is only anonymous comments that are deleted. You don't have to "register", just use an e-mail address and a name.

@35 - There's no problem and this is not typical IBM. This is better 8-)

Lotus SmartSuite including Symphony as well as Microsoft Office are totally unnecessary nowdadays. OpenOffice 2.3+ has it all, and has it all much better and functionally convenient.

I guess IBM just wants to get some positive attention by throwing away all obsolete software in the freeware pool, maybe it's better than just to admit that OpenOffice has won the race, long time ago.

I don't even use office programs a lot, but I was positively shocked when I tried to do an Quotation to a customer using OpenOffice Calc. Everything went so much faster and smoother (copy+paste works correctly also) than my previous work in Microsoft Excel. I had even to save the Excel sheet as HTML and edit it with Notepad since Excel screwed up all picture URL's (company logo, etc...). With OpenOffice Calc I can just send the whole .XLS (just in case my customers still use Microsoft Excel) file to my customers, as everything is linked correctly.

@27 - Dvorak obviously never used Symphony to create macro-driven applications. The database functionality (with forms) tied to a spreadsheet and the control over 'windows' via macros made it far more versatile at finishing an application than 1-2-3. Before I joined Lotus I worked for an energy management company and I built an entire energy management data input and billing system using Symphony. The alternative we looked at cost a lot more than the Symphony licenses and the man-hours to build it.

If Symphony is a beta, does anybody know if it contains debugging code? If so, can we expect a speed boost when that code is removed?

Cheers,

- Mike

@40, Mike, as I think was commented on in another thread (here or somewhere else today...), the only thing that is "beta" vs. the Notes 8 inclusion of the editors is the installer and the symphony.lotus.com website. The actual Symphony editors are at the same code level as the Notes 8 client. I do not believe there is any debug code in the Symphony editors.... do you ask because of something you saw in the download?

I enjoy beta testing software and experimented with Open Office some time back. With Lotus Symphony I was very disappointed with the download and installation experience from { Link }

The download director crashed my browser several times before I got it to work. The installation process resulted in an error which as best I can tell says that the installation application was not able to pull updates from an ibm website. I never was able to get the program up and running. The Help link on the ibm.com/symphony page takes you to the main IBM help page for the whole company rather than a help section dedicated to this software release.

It is entirely possible that some of the problems my be on my end, but first impressions go a long way. Lotus Symphony #2 is not off to a good start.

Anyone else had or heard of a similar experience?

Regards

Joe

@42 Joe, not only did the install work for me on two computers (and in 2 VMs), but the help link on the page takes me to a Symphony-specific page. At the bottom is help for installation.

There { Link } is written:

------------------------

Be sure you meet these client system requirements:

...

* 900MB disk space minimum

* 1G RAM memory minimum

------------------------

LOL

Whether i need to run this monster on the DeepBlueâ„¢ ???

@44 - I'm going to take the memory requirements to the next level with this question...

If Symphony is a "Minimum" of 1GB AND "These are the same as the productivity editors included in Lotus Notes 8", then riddle me this:

WHY are the minimum requirements for Notes 8 ONLY 512 MB with a "strongly recommended" 1GB??

I think it's time to finally admit it and update the release notes for Notes 8.0.1 to coincide with the requirements of Symphony. :)

I think the definition of "minimum" needs to be reviewed ;-)

Symphony Beta 1 works perfectly on my 512Mb RAM test box, and is taking less than 400Mb HD space.

Quick clarification.....

is Symphony based-upon the Eclipse RCP(and or Lotus Expeditor)? If so this seems very significant difference (in a good way) compared to the existing OpenOffice package.

Also will Notes 8 now be promoted as including Symphony (for free) or will ii still be known as the 'productivity editors' within the Notes client?

Nathan has an excellent post today describing what he believes is the background and the rationale behind the Symphony announcement. Well worth a read... { Link }

Branding the tool Lotus Symphony is brilliant. So far I have seen this linked to on Slashdot, Digg, read about it in all the papers, and on hundreds of blogs (non Domino related). It is generating quite a buzz.

@24 - Microsoft does a lot better than $60 for academic pricing of MS Office at many major universities. My kid gets "just-about-anything-Microsoft" (MS Office, Windows XP Professional, etc.) for $5 to $10 a pop at his university bookstore. These are full feature versions that convert to full licenses upon graduation. Does IBM/Lotus plan to penetrate the world of academia by making university students aware that they now have a choice with Symphony? Most college kids know only MS products until they enter the business world. This trend will continue, no matter how cheap (free), other alternatives are unless IBM/Lotus become a bit more proactive with building an awareness of their offerings.

I don't think of myself as an idiot until now. I cannot figure out for the life of me how to get this to work. I downloaded the file. Extracted the file. I see no setup button nothing. What have I done wrong????

@50 there's actually been a lot of angst in the system the last few weeks about Microsoft's academic program and their new "ultimate steal" program. { Link }

@51 not sure - please try the forums on symphony.lotus.com for ideas

Nope. I don't know what the issue is. I must have lost my geek savvy. I have now downloaded the "IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32" file to my desktop 4 times, extracted it. It gave me an "updatsite: winrar file. I then extracted that file and got a plug-in and feature file along with a "site" xml. No setup.exe file is to be founf anywhere. I see nothing about this in the forums.

are you downloading the Windows or Linux version?

@52 - So, let me get this straight. If I'm a student trying to decide on an affordable/free suite of office tools for my laptop, I've got the following alternatives from MS and IBM/Lotus:

MS Office Ultimate 2007 - The "Ultimate Steal" Offer:

Demonstrate Eligibility + Purchase License ($60) + Download Software + Install Software + Enter Genuine Product Key = Enjoy Office Ultimate 2007

Lotus Symphony - The "Free" Offer:

Download Software + Install Software = Enjoy Lotus Symphony

Hmmm... I'm going to need some time to think about this one :-)

@55 OpenOffice?

Wow. Talk about a blast from the past. I worked for IBM as a co-op student alternating quarters for school and work when I attended Ga. Tech. I worked on the tech support lines for the IBM Personal Decision Series.

If I remember correctly it was about 1984 that was tasked to do a competitive analysis of the IBM Personal Decision Series, Smart Software's Smart Series, Ashton-Tate's Framework, and (drum roll please) Lotus Symphony! How ironic it is now IBM that resurrects Lotus Symphony! Sometimes life cannot be more poetic. :-)

BTW, I think it is great that IBM is releasing this. I hope it puts tons of competitive pressure on Microsoft as they are in desperate need of a huge rethinking moving forward.

I have used 123 for about 25 years