The Symphony Blog

A little late with this news, something about real life getting in the way of blogging - terrible ;-)

Anyway, the latest beta of Lotus Symphony version 3 (based on OpenOffice 3 code) is now available.  IBM EMEA sales leader Darren Adams does a good job of passing on the news:

I’ve been using Symphony 3 on Windows and Mac since the release of beta 2 back in February. It’s a huge improvement over version 1.x – but beta 3 is another leap forward. The Symphony web site lists a few things new to beta 3… ability to customise the toolbars, instant export to PDF, and a new plug-in to make your LotusLive files directly available.

But there’s something else that I love about Symphony, and it’s improved in beta 3. In all aspects Symphony shows a panel on the right-hand side which gives quick and easy context-sensitive access to properties for whatever you’ve selected. It’s an approach that’s so much better than endlessly going in and out of dialog boxes, and makes Symphony very easy to use.

The Symphony Beta site fills in some of the details:

Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 3 is now available! Give it a try. Tell us what you think.

Lotus Symphony 3 Beta represents a major new advancement for our Lotus Symphony users. Based on current OpenOffice.org 3 code stream. Lotus Symphony 3 Beta offers loads of new features and capabilities and improved file fidelity. The Lotus Symphony team is excited to get it out to you and get your feedback.

Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 3 adds some exciting new enhancements. You can now customize the toolbars and arrange them as you like. We've added a one click export to PDF icon that you can add to your toolbar. You now have the option to create toolbars to support your individual work style.

We've continued to enhance the user interface and added more features to the sidebar panels in all three applications. We've added additional animations options to give you more choices and moved frequently used functions to the sidebars so you don't have to search for them. We're also connecting Lotus Symphony to the cloud with a new LotusLive plugin. You will be able to store and retrieve content directly from within the Symphony application to our LotusLive service. Make sure to get the plugin from the Symphony plugin page and sign up for the free 30 day trial of LotusLive.

So, download Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 3 today and try it out.

As a big LotusLive user I'm loving the integration that is being added to all the Lotus client software - Symphony is the latest to add this functionality.  I also get the impression that Beta 3 is a good deal faster than the earlier Betas, so give Beta 3 a try today!