IBM Lotus Symphony released, Free!

[ryengineer]

NEW YORK, NY - 18 Sep 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced IBM Lotus Symphony, a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Beginning today at www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony business, academic, governmental and consumer users alike can download this enterprise-grade office software, which is the same tool inside some of IBM's most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8. In addition, these tools can be used to seamlessly extend a business process or custom application to create dynamic composite applications.

There are three core applications that make up the Lotus Symphony tools: Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. These intuitive software tools, which support Windows and Linux desktops, are designed to handle the majority of office productivity tasks that workers typically perform. Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and Open Document Format (ODF), and also can output content in PDF format.

Increasingly, users of productivity software are challenging the confines of the desktop. IBM Lotus Symphony provides a fresh, people-oriented way to create, contribute and reuse content instantly across a wide range of applications. In addition, because it is based on ODF, Lotus Symphony allows organizations to access, use and maintain all their documents for the long-term, without worrying about ongoing software licensing and royalty fees.

"IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. "The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways."

Last week, IBM announced its membership in OpenOffice.org and intent to make important technical and resource contributions. By teaming with the community to accelerate the rate of innovation in the office productivity software marketplace, IBM expects to deliver higher value to users of its products and services. This will lead to a broader range of solutions and ODF-supported applications that draw from the OpenOffice.org technology.

IBM Lotus Symphony is consistent with IBM's strategy to help people find new ways to work together. The no-charge IBM Lotus Symphony software integrates editor functionality into everyday desktop and business applications.

IBM Lotus Symphony gives users the freedom to create and share information, as well as assemble composite applications that link to business processes. For example, IBM Lotus Symphony may be able to help businesses complete tasks more rapidly and efficiently by connecting to relevant information from a variety of sources. Companies can integrate IBM Lotus Symphony tools into their custom applications and easily connect to myriad data sources to create composite applications. These rich applications enable users to work in a single view, and present data from multiple sources instantly.

In one scenario, ERP systems can be linked directly into a user's workspace. The user can submit queries to the ERP system which will respond with the requested data. This is delivered to a user's workspace, where IBM Lotus Symphony Documents automatically populates the fields in a customer's shipping invoice. All of this can be accomplished immediately, with the user having a consistent consolidated view of the task at hand. Keeping the focus on this consolidated workspace may lead to improved user productivity.

For more information please visit: www.ibm.com/lotus and this.

[GomJabbar]

Looks like Microsoft got a one-two punch this week!

[mgo]

NEW YORK, NY - 18 Sep 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced IBM Lotus Symphony, a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

I downloaded it, and it took about forever to fill out the form to get the download. (but, patience is not one of my virtues)

The first download took an hour and a half for a 130+meg file. (busy server perhaps-usually a file that size would take 20 min or less with my connection) It did not install, and seemed to be a few kb short of a complete download. -all I got was a momentary cmd window and then nothing when clicking the .exe on the first download.

2nd hour and a half download try seemed successful, but clicking the .exe after the download was finished gave me a CMD window for a moment and then nothing seemed to happen.

But, In a minute or so, other files and folders appeared in the temp folder where I had place the Symphony download. One of them was an installer.

Windows Vista in its usual divine flakiness didn't seem to want to close the dialogs after the downloaded was completed so I had to do the three finger salute to stop that foolishness manually. Despite that, the program seemed to have made the trip to my computer intact.

After some fiddling and cussin' the program finally installed and I ran two of the three sections briefly to look at them, word processor and spreadsheet program.

This was on a ThinkPad R51 running Vista with 1.5 gig of ram and a 1.6 gig chip, as I recall. (I use that machine as a sort of "lab animal")

When opening an existing .doc file created in MS Word 2007, there is a warning in Symphony that some features of the doc may not run properly. For me, though, graphics and tables of contents created in Word worked well in Symphony.

In the spreadsheet section, the blood sugar Excel report I had created in MS Office 2007showed the data part ok, but the graph looked goofy with some markers dropping down to zero.

The interface for the word processor is clean and easy to look at, and intuitive to use. Ditto for the spreadsheet.

One of the computer mags, in their article said this was a -online- program. It is not. It runs right on your machine. No internet connection is needed.

"By Chloe Albanesius
IBM on Tuesday launched a beta suite of free, online office applications intended to compete with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office and boost the presence of IBM's Lotus Notes."
-sloppy journalism that this writer did not know what the program was even about!- (of course, maybe Symphony does run online as well....I just did not notice that in my quick look thru the features of the installed program)

I'm a MS Office 2007 user, and like it for the Word, Excel and wonderful OneNote application found in the Student & Teacher Edition that I have.

If I wanted a freebee office program however, my 1st choice would still be Open Office. Symphony shows some promise in this beta release, however.

[jdhurst]

If true, watch out. Symphony was a pig that drove me away from Lotus permanently. I am not the only one. If true (the announcement) then it is really unfortunate for IBM to voluntarily call their new suite an Edsel. ... JDH

[eddy eddy]

I hate Lotus Notes.

[syedj]

I hate Lotus Notes.

I second that with all my might. Its one of the most unintuitive softwares that I have ever had the displeasure to use.

[RasmusP]

I was quite excited by when I saw the news at Notebook Review. However, when I got the software it kind of disappointed. I got the impression that this office suite was made with (online) collaboration in mind. It is really hard to find a good program to archived this.
At the University we do reports in groups. It is horrible; some people use Office 2003 (.doc), one person use Office 2007 (.docx) and I use LaTeX via Emacs and AUCTeX (it output pdf or dvi).

The new Lotus suit have, however, brought some good things to OOo. The interface of Lotus is way better than OOo. It is nicer to look at, and the tab feature seems like a nice touch.
One thing that would really improve the document output, would be to make a nice, standard template. Generally, WYSIWYG word processors (OOo and Office etc) output ugly documents! Next, they should remove the font menu, and only keep the style menu.

Anyway... This version of Lotus suit is horribly slow. Way slower than OOo.

Furthermore, IBM will have 35 employees working on OOo constantly; Quite nice.
-Rasmus

[ptantra]

If true, watch out. Symphony was a pig that drove me away from Lotus permanently. I am not the only one. If true (the announcement) then it is really unfortunate for IBM to voluntarily call their new suite an Edsel. ... JDH

IBM reused the name "Symphony." This is definitely a different product (rather group of products).

I second that with all my might. Its one of the most unintuitive softwares that I have ever had the displeasure to use.

Personally, I love Lotus Notes. It's probably the most powerful and versatile piece of software I've ever used. Lotus Notes 8 features a completely (and much needed) revamped UI.

[The Spirit of X21]

Anyway... This version of Lotus suit is horribly slow. Way slower than OOo.

Furthermore, IBM will have 35 employees working on OOo constantly; Quite nice.

It's very disappointing to hear about the slowness of Symphony. Of course, if IBM can speed up OpenOffice and keep it from hogging so much RAM, I'm all for it!

[elite-elitist]

The features are exactly the same as in Open Office.

BTW, in the spreadsheets does anyone know how to make a linear regression curve that starts are the origin? I can make the curve, I just don't know how to make it start at the origin.