The Symphony Blog

Due to my every increasing workload, shift away from exclusive focus on IBM/Lotus products and the creation of new blogs/news sites elsewhere, this blog is being sunset as of today, 10th November 2011, and will no longer be maintained.

All posts and comments have been copied over to the Collaboration Matters blog at blog.collaborationmatters.com, and any links will be redirected there.

Thank you to all our readers and contributors over the past 3.5 years (the first post was on 1st February 2008!) - your support has been much appreciated!

Stuart.

By: Stuart McIntyre | 0 Comments | On: 10 November 2011 14:43:53 | Tags:  symphony 

Now this is a neat plugin for Symphony, and one that really will improve productivity for those using Lotus Web Content Management (WCM):

IBM Lotus Symphony Plugin for Lotus Web Content Management 7.0

The IBM Lotus Symphony Plugin for Lotus Web Content Management helps customers simplify the process of authoring Web Content managed and delivered by IBM Lotus Web Content Management (WCM). By introducing the concept of “profiles”, content authors can create, edit and publish rich documents from within Lotus Symphony to Lotus Web Content Management as native web content just as easily and simply just as if they were authoring local documents as normal. 



In order to install and use the IBM Lotus Symphony Plugin for Lotus Web Content Management, the following steps must be completed. 
1. The IT administrator deploys the WCM Rest Service on the WCM server (Part 1 ) and then creates and sets up the Public Profiles (Part 2);
2. The content author installs the Lotus Symphony Plugin for Lotus Web Content Management (Part 3), creates servers (Part 4) and private profiles (Part 5).
3. After the server and profile have been created correctly, the content author can use Lotus Symphony to create and publish (Part 6) and edit (Part 7 and Part 8) the content. 

There is a read me file included in the installation package, please download the package and follow the read me document step by step to install and use the plug-in. This plug-in does not support dragging to install directly from the web page.

Download here.

By: Stuart McIntyre | 0 Comments | On: 2 March 2011 10:45:25 | Tags:  symphony  wcm  lotus 

This was one of my favourite announcements at today's Lotusphere (#ls11) OGS - the planned release of LotusLive Symphony, a production version of IBM's Project Concord research project.

Ed kicks us off:

Today IBM announced LotusLive Symphony, a revolution in online collaborative document editing.  With a preview release later this quarter and final release later this year, LotusLive Symphony delivers word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations for users looking to improve efficiency and collaboration during the content authoring process.  Like all of the LotusLive story, one of the unique differentiators for LotusLive Symphony is its ability to provide that value to interactions with customers, suppliers, and business partners in addition to colleagues within an organization.

In our mind, document editing is about more than cell formulas, formatting, and animation.  LotusLive Symphony offers capabilities such as real-time or private co-editing, live sections, author presence awareness, contextual commenting, assignment and notifications, and task and attention management cues.  Initially designed for use with LotusLive, we are also exploring ways to deliver these capabilities in an on-premises environment through an initial customer partnership.

We announced LotusLive Symphony a year ago as Project "Concord", and now have made significant progress and are ready for Technical Preview release 2.  That will go live on Greenhouse.lotus.com after Lotusphere.

eWeek covered the announcement well:

LotusLive Symphony in the Cloud complements its on-premise, free of charge, office productivity suite, IBM Lotus Symphony. IBM has seen more than 50 million downloads of Lotus Symphony, and recently introduced updates including tighter integrations with the desktop to LotusLive allowing users to click to the cloud to get, save, share and collaborate on documents.  

National Bank TRUST is a social business using Symphony to collaborate on documents and transform their business processes, IBM officials said in its press release.

"The collaborative editing support and productivity gains make Symphony unique in the productivity suites market," said Sergey Chikov, director, NB TRUST's Board of information and banking technologies for remote sale of credit products, in a statement.

Meanwhile ComputerWorld sounded a note of caution:

With this release, IBM is joining an increasingly crowded field of Web office productivity suites. In December, Oracle launched the first version of itsown hosted office service, called Cloud Office. That version is based on OpenOffice as well. Microsoft offers consumers some basic online office document editing capability through its Office Web Apps service. It also has plans to roll this service into its enterprise-focused BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) set of hosted services as well.

Still, very interesting announcement - I look forward to hearing more during the week...

By: Stuart McIntyre | 1 Comments | On: 31 January 2011 16:38:07 | Tags:  symphony  lotus  lotuslive 

Lars Berntrop-Bos raises a request via Ed's blog:

... Keep in mind [that when you replace the Symphony 1.x embedded in the Notes client with Symphony 3.x] you then LOSE the SmartSuite compatibility. A major oversight imho. I regret having to reverse, I rather liked Symphony 3.0.

@Ed: Please, please please, I would like to ask you to reconsider. To make Symphony more universally useful I would like to be able to at least read/view/import all the file formats Symphony 1.x supports. Can you respond and/or forward this request to the appropriate person(s)?

So, dear Symphony users, is Lotus Smartsuite compatibility a requirement for you or your organisation?

Do you have lots of old Word Pro documents, 1-2-3 spreadsheets and Freelance presentations stored on file servers that you still need to be able to read and update? I'd love to know how important this requirement is...

By: Stuart McIntyre | 7 Comments | On: 14 December 2010 09:51:39 | Tags:  symphony  lotus  smartsuite 

These are useful overviews - I didn't know that many of these new features were in Lotus Symphony 3:

By: Stuart McIntyre | 0 Comments | On: 14 December 2010 07:59:26 | Tags:  symphony  presentations  lotus  youtube 

A useful overview of what's in the newly released Lotus Symphony 3.

(I'm trying to track down a higher resolution version of this and will update this post as soon as I find it!) Found it - thanks Eric!

By: Stuart McIntyre | 3 Comments | On: 2 November 2010 20:04:00 | Tags:  symphony  video  overview  youtube 

The list of what's changed between Lotus Symphony 1.3 and Lotus Symphony 3 is probably better articulated as 'what hasn't changed' - it really is a complete line-by-line rewrite to take in the changes in the OpenOffice 3 code.

However, there is a detailed list in the Release Notes for Symphony 3 - here are the changes to the overall suite:

New Features
      •        VBA scripts support
      •        ODF 1.2 standard support
      •        Office 2007 OLE support
      •        Brand new sidebars containing enriched property sections and panels across different editors, with support of sidebar panel management to show or hide sidebar panels
      •        Ability to customize toolbar content and layout
      •        Ability to create new business cards and labels
      •        Ability to insert OLE, audio and video files
      •        Master document support
      •        Support of Live Text
      •        Enabled file encryption and password protection with Microsoft Word and Excel files
      •        Support for "Open in new window". Users can use Command+~ on Mac OS and Alt + Tab on XP/Vista to switch windows
      •        New clip art gallery
      •        More template files
      •        Support of VML images in OOXML files
      •        Support of more parameters for protecting spreadsheet files and sheets in VBA API
      •        Support of separate downloads of spell check dictionary addons for 22 languages for Windows OS users
      •        Support of same build re-installation in silent mode on Windows
      •        Support of online check of new product updates
Enhancements
      •        Better graphic object rendering through improved anti-aliasing
      •        Refined main menu and toolbar design for better usability and consistency across editors
      •        Ability to open a file by dragging and dropping it to a tab or empty workbench
      •        Better usability during the operation of dragging graphic objects
      •        Enhanced the usability in manipulating color property with new color picker controls
      •        Enabled new progress bar to launch and load/save files
      •        Enabled memorizing user file paths when inserting objects into file
      •        Added one click link to LotusLive website on homepage
      •        Improved accessibility support for graphic objects in files and help
      •        Various additional user experience enhancements
      •        Significant enhancement in online help content and structure

Impressive, huh?

For the rest of the list, check below the fold, or else the Release Notes themselves.

Continue Reading "Whats new in Lotus Symphony 3?" »

By: Stuart McIntyre | 1 Comments | On: 22 October 2010 07:08:04 | Tags:  symphony  lotus  whatsnew 

As promised, the new release of Lotus Symphony is up on the site and available for download today.  

Based on the OpenOffice version 3 code, this is a massive step forward for Symphony, with much improved UI, increased fidelity with both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office formats, read support for Office 2007/2010 documents and much more.  Symphony 3 is available for Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X 10.6, and SUSE/RedHat/Ubuntu Linux.

Download it now...

By: Stuart McIntyre | 3 Comments | On: 21 October 2010 06:30:33 | Tags:  symphony  lotus  available  download 

We have just had word that the GA release of Lotus Symphony 3 will be available tomorrow, that's 21st October 2010, from the Symphony website.

Excellent news!

By: Stuart McIntyre | 1 Comments | On: 20 October 2010 15:51:23 | Tags:  symphony  lotus  ibm  ga  availability 

Two members of IBM's Lotus Symphony team joined Darren Duke and I on the This Week in Lotus podcast this week to discuss the latest news regarding the upcoming Lotus Symphony 3 release:

Guests:  
David Pearson (twitter | email) is a senior architect in the IBM Software Services for Lotus Centre of Excellence, and is also IBM's worldwide services leader for Symphony. He has been at Lotus / IBM for 14 years.
Eric Otchet (email) is currently the Product Manager for Lotus Symphony.  He has been with IBM for over 22 years and has held both technical and sales positions during that time.

Topics included:

Symphony 3 launch:

• What is IBM Lotus Symphony ?
• How did Symphony come about?
• What is IBM's strategy ?
• Can you describe the Symphony roadmap ?
• What is the relationship with the OpenOffice community ? What does IBM do with OpenOffice Code ?
• Will split in OO movement help or hinder (LibreOffice)? Does IBM feed back into OO code?
• What are the key differences between OpenOffice and Symphony ? Is there round-trip compatibility?
• How Does Symphony link into the rest of the Lotus portfolio ?
• When will Symphony v3 be available ?
• What are the key new things in Symphony v3 to get excited about ?
• Once Symphony 3 ships, can we integrate it into (and over) the current Lotus Notes Symphony install?
• What is Project Concord and how does that integrate with Symphony ?
• Any plans to extend Symphony to include Draw and give us a real Visio replacement?  Or a database?
• When will be able to save as docx, xlsx and pptx?
• Quickr connectors? Coming? Dates?
• Get more information from symphony.lotus.com

Link: This Week in Lotus 022 - Symphony 3 - Free, Free, Free!!

By: Stuart McIntyre | 0 Comments | On: 20 October 2010 15:43:38 | Tags:  symphony  lotus  ga  release  thisweekinlotus