Symphony 1.0 just around the corner?
Stuart McIntyre 16 May 2008 10:41:52
Alan clearly thinks so...Coming soon... get ready!It would be great to have some accurate dates to work from. Come on IBM!
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A book to look out for...
Stuart McIntyre 26 April 2008 06:33:46
John Wiley & Sons has announced that they will be publishing a book on Lotus Symphony later this year:The book explains how to create a wide range of word processing documents, using Lotus Documents. Document-building tasks such as formatting, adding reference items and style building are covered. Readers find out how to create tables and Web pages, insert and work with graphics, add charts to documents, and include spreadsheet information in documents. Readers learn about the different file formats that Lotus Documents includes and how best to use these formats for distributing and sharing files with other users. Coverage of importing, viewing, and editing Microsoft Word documents is featured as well.
In Lotus Spreadsheets, readers learn how to create spreadsheets for calculating, analyzing, and managing key business and organizational data. The book discusses several different calculations in ways that help the reader get his or her job done. For example, what-if calculations are explained so readers know what kind of data to input into Lotus Spreadsheets, how to set up the what-if scenarios, and how to analyze the resulting data. Formulas and functions that users can use with Lotus Spreadsheets are described, including examples of real-world applications for them. The book also shows how to organize data in spreadsheets (such as hiding data), set up data ranges, calculate subtotals, and create charts. Readers learn how to import and modify Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets.
For readers looking to use the Lotus Presentations to create and modify screen shows, this book will be one of the first on the market to show how. Included in the book are features such as the following:
- Using templates to create professional and attention-grabbing presentations
- Adding charts, drawing objects, text, multimedia and a variety of other items in presentation pages
- Importing and modifying Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations
- Spicing up presentations with animations, page transitions, multimedia objects, and effects
- Viewing thumbnail views of slide pages using the Page Sorter view
- Practicing presentations using the timing rehearsal feature
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developerWorks: Introducing OpenDocument
Stuart McIntyre 23 April 2008 07:40:39
A fascinating introductory tutorial from Uche Ogbuji has been posted over on developerWorks:The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is an XML standard that lets you store and exchange office application documents, including word-processor, spreadsheet, and presentation files. Whether you try to perform special tasks on files saved from such applications or work on applications to process such files, you should become familiar with this important format. Learn about the two possible forms of OpenDocument files, as multipart packages and as single XML documents, and learn how to structure text and tabular information in OpenDocument.If you're a new Lotus Symphony user or developer and are interested in ODF and its heritage and applications, this is a really good place to start...In this tutorial
Even from the early days of computers in the office, word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software were the giants among applications. From Lotus® 1-2-3 and WordStar to today's behemoth integrated office suites, much of the information valuable to computer users is maintained in the saved files of office apps. Recently people and organizations are more conscious about the importance of open data formats. You don't entirely own your data if the only way to use it is through the interface of a proprietary application. With the acceptance of XML as lingua franca for semi-structured data, users inevitably began to demand open formats for their office apps, preferably in XML. Users want to be able to make some sense of what's in their saved files, and to use a variety of tools on them.
Responding to such demands In 2002, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) began an effort to create a standard for office application files, formally called OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications and popularly abbreviated ODF. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) followed up with acceptance of ODF as an international standard (ISO/IEC 26300). After years of overall development, ODF nears version 1.2 and covers spreadsheets, word processor documents, presentation files, drawings, and more. You've probably come across files with extensions such as .odt, .ods, .odp, or .odd. Obviously you can process such files by running an office application suite. But sometimes you need more control, or you need to do things that are not the typical role for office applications. Suppose you wanted to develop a system that automatically generated open document files from a Web form, or perhaps a search engine for office documents. In such cases you need a good understanding of the storage format, and this tutorial offers an easy start.
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Jo Grant: A vision of Symphony Spreadsheets Integration
Stuart McIntyre 22 April 2008 09:30:17
IBM has built Lotus Symphony to be extensible from the ground up, so that it is able to be integrated with both other IBM applications (such as Notes and Quickr) and with 3rd-party solutions. This also opens up the possibility of developers extending Symphony into areas that we might not even have considered just yet, such as metaverses or 3D worlds such as Second Life.Jo Grant has written a great blog post exploring some of the possibilities for Symphony spreadsheets:
I was explaining my interest in integration between IBM Lotus Workplace products and Second Life in another blog but that description didn't resonate. It struck me that a longer description might be worth a blog entry in its own right in my blog. I've been meaning to do a series of entries on possible integration points anyway so lets start off with the IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheet.Jo then mentions that he thinks the solutions is already feasible today, and considers how it might be done...
User Experience
Mark Ajeti is an analyst for a non-profit company who monitors public expenditure and is responsible for spotting trends in spending habits. His company recently migrated to Lotus Symphony because it is free and supports non-proprietary document formats. He imports his data into a Symphony spreadsheet to examine it in various ways. The charting feature provided is fundamental as seeing a picture of his data often helps him to understand more deeply what is going on than just numbers. With more data becoming available for examination the complexity of the relationships he is looking for has increased. He needs a more powerful way of looking at the information.
So Mark selects the elements of data he is interested in. He then selects a menu entry that was supplied by a plugin to Symphony. This looks a lot like the charting tool except that the charts he can choose amongst are all three dimensional. He chooses amongst these the data representation he wants to try and it informs him it is creating the chart definitions for Second Life.
Mark then switches tabs in his Symphony Environment to an embedded Second Life viewer supplied by another plugin. The Head's Up Display his Second Life avatar is wearing indicates the new chart along with the other charts he has available for viewing. He selects the new chart and it begins to be constructed before him.
When it is finished he can examine the chart, fly over it, or walk through it to see the data from different angles. He can copy it to his inventory, and pass it to several colleagues along with his comments for their interest.
One of his colleagues, Louise Mäkitie, thinks that one of the views shows something important and wants to work it into a presentation she is planning. However we will discuss that, next, when we talk about Symphony Presentations integration.
Symphony is easily extendable with the menu and 3D charting tool described. I already have a fairly crude servlet that creates 3D pie charts. Adding in an embedded Second Life viewer is no harder than embedding it in a browser, which has already been done. On the Second Life side, I've already created proofs of concept for this sort of work. It's a little slow because of anti-griefing protections Second Life has, but it's usable.A fascinating look into what might be possible - I'd love to see something like this come to fruition!
I would estimate it would take about 120 programming hours to implement this integration. No special knowledge is required. All the information for Symphony integration is in the published SDK and Eclipse manuals. Second Life scripting is public knowledge and the client is open source.
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Chris Pepin: Lotus Symphony at IBM
Stuart McIntyre 11 April 2008 04:28:39
Chris is an Executive Information Technology Architect for the IBM Office of the CIO. In that role, Chris has responsibility for IBM's internal end user services strategy encompassing both hardware (e.g. laptops) and software (e.g. Lotus Software, Web 2.0, etc.). An important job indeed!In a recent post, Chris details how IBM is rolling out Lotus Symphony amongst its users:
Microsoft Office is the industry's leading productivity suite and has close to 85% marketshare. The downside? It's expensive - especially for a company as large as IBM that continues to grow. At last count, IBM had 370,000 employees. Money spent on Microsoft Office licenses increases IBM's overall expenses. Launched last year, Lotus Symphony beta offersFrom Twitter messages I know that Chris has more to say on this "challenge" to the internal users and so it will be interesting to hear how the migration progresses over the next months and years."productivity tools that are intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge. Lotus Symphony puts you in charge – take control over spiraling upgrade costs, ensure access to documents well into the future with new standard file formats (ODF), get more from your current investments with support for Microsoft® Windows® and Office file types.... even extend your applications with the new Lotus Symphony developer toolkit. Lotus Symphony offers something for everyone! Read more about benefits for users, businesses, and developers"Inside IBM, our employees are using Lotus Symphony and in some cases, removing Microsoft Office from their workstations. Later this year, the product is targeted to graduate out of beta as also release a Mac OS X client.
Already I know of a large number of IBMers who have either removed MS Office from their Windows machines or else migrated entirely to a Linux desktop running Lotus Symphony. These have been successful "power user" migrations where MS Office has not been missed and significant licence fees saved, so there are clearly benefits to be had from taking this route.
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A user’s view on why Symphony has replaced OpenOffice on his machine
Stuart McIntyre 10 April 2008 11:39:18
Great post from Ankur Banerjee:Frankly, I’ve lost all interest in OpenOfficeever since I came across IBM’s Lotus Symphony
. Yes, I’m perfectly aware that right now it’s under a proprietary license - but that’s because it modifies an older code-base of OpenOffice (v1.x), which was dual-licensed. Anyway, Symphony 2.0 will also be released, and will have to be open source as the OOo v2.x code-base is under LGPL. Why do I like this new entrant? Here’s why:
- Tabbed interface: It’s high time someone did this, given that it has been so popular in the web browser market. Lotus Symphony has a tabbed interface - which means, you can open up a word document, a spreadsheet, and a presentation - all in one window in tabs. Or any combination of the type of documents.
- Context-sensitive editing: Many people have said time and again that they find MS Office 2007’s Ribbon-style confusing. Symphony finds an elegant solution to that, by keep the normal formatting bar where it should be; and instead, adding a context-sensitive sidebar. So for example, when you open a presentation, the sidebar shows stuff that you can do on a slide / page; while if you click on an object (like a picture or a text box), it changes to show stuff you can do on that object. Even the formatting bar at the top keeps graying out options which can’t be used at that time.
- Better looks!: I wouldn’t have admitted this fact earlier, but since Symphony is out, to hell with OOo. Absolutely childish icons, as if they had been made in TuxPaint
. In fact, I’m darn sure they must have been made in TuxPaint. Symphony’s interface is the total opposite, with a nice cool blue shade, and everything else which doesn’t look like a GTK+ program. Put simply, it looks elegant.
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Symphony Developer Toolkit is available
Stuart McIntyre 10 April 2008 11:29:52
The Lotus Symphony Developer Toolkit is now available for download:
The wait is over – IBM Lotus Symphony can now be extended with plug-ins to integrate and enhance a wide range of applications from IBM, and you.Download it now from the new Symphony Developers page.
Now it is easy to make Lotus Symphony part of your business solution. Integrate Lotus Symphony documents with other data such as IBM Lotus Notes applications, WebSphere Translation Server, or other important applications in your organization for linked value at the desktop.
Designed to leverage open technology and provide an easy development and deployment environment, Lotus Symphony will support leading development technologies – Java/Eclipse, LotusScript, OpenOffice, and .Net* (*.Net support planned for a future release).
As of Beta 4, you can extend Lotus Symphony with Eclipse plug-ins using our API's and Developer Toolkit. Also, with support for LotusScript (when the Symphony productivity tools are used inside Notes 8) and the UNO API, Lotus Symphony supports a wide range of development requirements and business needs.
Are you a developer interested to learn more? The new IBM Lotus Symphony Developer Toolkit for creating Eclipse plug-ins is here. The toolkit provides documentation as well as samples and tutorials that you need to build your plug-ins.
So, whether you are a Lotus Notes developer using LotusScript or a Java developer on Eclipse, you have the ability to leverage Lotus Symphony in your business applications.
The tutorial in the toolkit provides instructions for creating a simple document workflow plug-in. The document workflow application provides a way to apply a simple workflow to your office documents in a document library. The document you will use in this lab is built on a specific template, and stored locally. In this lab, you will create the plug-in from start to finish and use pre-created snippets of code in order to speed the manual data entry process. This lab is intended for developers who would like to use the plug-in development environment to extend Lotus Symphony and who are familiar with Java programming. Eclipse and OpenOffice.org UNO programming knowledge are preferred but not necessary.
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Lotus Symphony has a Wikipedia entry...
Stuart McIntyre 9 April 2008 21:54:11
... so it must be good ;-)IBM Lotus Symphony is a set of applications comprising:Clearly someone from IBM is making sure this entry gets updated frequently, which is definitely worthwhile.
* IBM Lotus Symphony Documents, a word processor
* IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, a spreadsheet program
* IBM Lotus Symphony Presentations, a presentation program
Symphony supports the OpenDocument format (ODF), as well as Microsoft Office and Lotus SmartSuite formats, but not the Office Open XML format used by Microsoft Office 2007. It can also export Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
Symphony is available for Linux and Windows, with Mac OS X support announced for the first half of 2008. It is based on Eclipse Rich Client Platform from IBM Lotus Expeditor for its shell and OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 for the core office suite code.[1] Symphony requires 512 MB of RAM and 540 MB of hard drive space.[2] Because Lotus Symphony is based on the 1.1.4 version of OpenOffice.org which was dual licensed under both the LGPL as well as Sun's own SISSL which allowed for entities to change the code without releasing their changes, IBM does not have to release the source code of Symphony.
IBM unofficially predicts that it will release version 1.0 of Lotus Symphony in the first quarter of 2008 as a free download. IBM plans to incorporate code from the latest version of OpenOffice.org into version 2.0. Symphony 2.0 will also include modules that are already part of OpenOffice.org, including an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program, as well as other modules specifically provided by IBM.[3].
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PSC announce new "IBM Lotus Symphony Jumpstart" offering
Stuart McIntyre 9 April 2008 21:43:50
John Head has details of a new Lotus Symphony-focused solution from his company, PSC:(PSC are headquartered in Chicago and have offices in Kansas City and Minneapolis.)
I am pleased to announce a new PSC solution that provides services for IBM Lotus Symphony. A 2 day services package, the 1st day provides an executive and developer briefing. The 2nd day provides an analysis of how the company is using Lotus Symphony competitors, both for end-users and custom applications and integration, and helps make a case for migration. You can get the PDF about the package here.
If anyone is interested in this offering, please contact me! I think 2008 will be a very interesting year for Lotus Symphony.
It's good to see IBM partners really adding value to the Lotus Symphony proposition - it just goes to show that there can be a case for chargeable services around free/open source solutions where there is real expertise and product knowledge involved.
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Taking Notes podcast re: Symphony integration
Stuart McIntyre 16 February 2008 22:01:04
Another sterling effort by the Taking Notes crew:Well worth a listen on the commute home...
Taking Notes Episode 76: 2008.02.16 - Reporting and Notes integration with MS Office and Lotus Symphony with Integra and PSC 2.16.2008
Bruce and Julian talk with John Head from The PSC Group and John de Gorgio from Integra4Notes where we talked about:
* Using Integra4Notes to generaated pixel perfect reports from Notes
* Integra4Notes Personal Edition - FREE
* Lotus Symphony
* Some predictions about Lotus Symphony
* and much more
This podcast was sponsored by Instant Technologies. It is 20.7mb and runs 45:08 minutes at 64kps.
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